I suppose there is an easy answer for this prompt: I write because I can’t not write. My fingers will always find the pen and paper and fill it with a scrawled script; a make-shift map to my minds eye. I have done this since I was little and I can’t begin to fathom how may pages I’ve filled, how much ink I’ve used, how many pencils I’ve worn down to a stub. And that doesn’t account for the notes in my phone, the word documents on my computer, or the multi-coloured post it notes that fall out of books. But it’s not quite as simple as that is it?
These ramblings carve out my joys, my fears, my hopes, my resentments, my dreams, my half-hatched plans for building a life. But at the end of it all, that is all they are. They are ramblings. Some are random segments of chain whose links don’t seem to have the right fastenings to clip together, others resemble tangled necklaces at the bottom of a dusty jewellery box. I read them back sometimes and think ok great, but what now? Usually at this time a voice starts to whisper in my head, a voice that sounds like mine but isn’t, breathing the words, this is pointless, over and over and over again.
Other times I read my words and get frustrated with myself for only recording a surface-level sensation. It feels as though I’m censoring myself, as though I can only dive a certain depth under my own skin before I’m forced back to the surface – unsatisfied that I have left something unexplored, unsaid. This is another trigger for that voice, see you can’t do it, see you have nothing to say, see this is pointless. Louder this time. Whining on and on until it can’t be ignored. Until those words become my own. Until I stop reaching for the pen. Until I can’t write.
My mind does not still, the words race around as furious as wasps trapped in a pint glass. The buzz continues until my depression grips hold and my insides start to fill with thick black treacle. That usually stops the wasps, but it usually stops me as well. I could be out a couple of days, a couple of weeks, or a good few months. Eventually my fingers twitch for the pen again; or the keyboard, like today, when I searched for a prompt to bring me back to the page, to write myself back to me.
So, I guess I write to make sense of it all, and I’m trying not to worry about fitting all the fragments together, or the things that truly scares me the most: what if I can’t stop writing, but what if I never find a way to make sense of it? What if there’s no book in me? What if I’ve peaked and from here on out it’s just this weird relentless cycle of words, wasps, and thick black treacle?
I feel sure that, like me, others reading this will feel grateful to you, Jenni, for giving such visceral shape to something so many of us experience - that voice which makes it sometimes so hard to do meaningful work. It reminds me to go back to an essay called Serious Noticing by James Wood (I think), where he talks about how the world never wanted our stories… or rather it wants stories, but of a particular kind, easily monetised… he doesn’t offer any easy fix for the struggle to put our stories in the world, but like your words, it reminds me that while writing can often be full of flow and pleasure and purpose, othertimes we have to experience a sense of absurdity, of struggle… If I find a link to it later, I’ll put it here in case it’s of interest. xx
That sounds like a really interesting essay, I will search it out. It's such a tricky one to balance, and deep down you know it's a balancing act, that will level out eventually but it doesn't make those struggles any easier. We're all on that creative rollercoaster in one way or another. It felt good to be honest about it though, to admit that I put so much of my self-worth on my writing is a scary demon to look at, but clearly I need to examine it.
I suppose there is an easy answer for this prompt: I write because I can’t not write. My fingers will always find the pen and paper and fill it with a scrawled script; a make-shift map to my minds eye. I have done this since I was little and I can’t begin to fathom how may pages I’ve filled, how much ink I’ve used, how many pencils I’ve worn down to a stub. And that doesn’t account for the notes in my phone, the word documents on my computer, or the multi-coloured post it notes that fall out of books. But it’s not quite as simple as that is it?
These ramblings carve out my joys, my fears, my hopes, my resentments, my dreams, my half-hatched plans for building a life. But at the end of it all, that is all they are. They are ramblings. Some are random segments of chain whose links don’t seem to have the right fastenings to clip together, others resemble tangled necklaces at the bottom of a dusty jewellery box. I read them back sometimes and think ok great, but what now? Usually at this time a voice starts to whisper in my head, a voice that sounds like mine but isn’t, breathing the words, this is pointless, over and over and over again.
Other times I read my words and get frustrated with myself for only recording a surface-level sensation. It feels as though I’m censoring myself, as though I can only dive a certain depth under my own skin before I’m forced back to the surface – unsatisfied that I have left something unexplored, unsaid. This is another trigger for that voice, see you can’t do it, see you have nothing to say, see this is pointless. Louder this time. Whining on and on until it can’t be ignored. Until those words become my own. Until I stop reaching for the pen. Until I can’t write.
My mind does not still, the words race around as furious as wasps trapped in a pint glass. The buzz continues until my depression grips hold and my insides start to fill with thick black treacle. That usually stops the wasps, but it usually stops me as well. I could be out a couple of days, a couple of weeks, or a good few months. Eventually my fingers twitch for the pen again; or the keyboard, like today, when I searched for a prompt to bring me back to the page, to write myself back to me.
So, I guess I write to make sense of it all, and I’m trying not to worry about fitting all the fragments together, or the things that truly scares me the most: what if I can’t stop writing, but what if I never find a way to make sense of it? What if there’s no book in me? What if I’ve peaked and from here on out it’s just this weird relentless cycle of words, wasps, and thick black treacle?
I can’t think of a worse thing than having existed on this planet yet leaving it without making a mark; as if I’d never been here at all.
To me, it’s our purpose, the sole reason for our creation, to make change, improve things, enlighten and do something noteworthy before we die.
My favourite quotes of all time come from Londoners who have long since left this earthly plane, the most used, Dr. Samuel Johnson’s, who shuffled off this mortal coil in 1784:
“When a man is tired of London he is tired of life, for there is in London all that life can afford”
He wasn’t wrong then, he isn’t wrong now.
The diarist Samuel Pepys, gone in 1703, tells us more of everyday life of his time in the moments he caught in ink, than anything else:
“... I did dig another [pit], and put our wine in it: and I, my Parmazan cheese, as well as my wine and some other things”
And the great caricaturist William Hogarth although adding pictures to words, departed 1764, traps moments in history that are easily seen in our modern day personalities:
“I have generally found that persons who have studied painting least were the best judges of it.”
Written words capture the essence of time better than anything else, and that is the reason I write.
I’m currently working on my memoir, Fighting The Dreamkillers, which is a work that explores how I use the culture I consume to become more enlightened and educated when it comes to a specific subject. Each of my chapters starts with a list, 1.Music, 2.Theatre, 3.Book, 4.Art. 5.Exhibition & 6.Film that relates to it.
Take my chapter on money, Abba let me know the perception of the societal fight of being poor, David Hare on the Stage of the National Theatre explained the insanity of money markets, The Big Short, a film, spelt out the Financial Crash and the lie that created it,
The other book I’m writing, Why Don’t People Help?: The Decline of Civil Society & How We Can Reverse It, is the one I hope has the most impact on public consciousness after I’m gone. It’s an explanation of how Britain has lost its way when it comes to community and how we can individually do things to put that right. We blame too much on the state and do too little ourselves.
But if that comes to naught I’ll still have achieved my goal.
My video diary is in the Museum of London’s permanent collection, my written electric diaries, social media and emails are being collected into the London Metropolitan Archive over the coming months, I have a Cartoon, a collaboration with Private Eye cartoonist Mike Stokoe, in the Cartoon Museum.
So like my former counterparts, my words are already saved. Will they matter? Only time will tell, but they’re there for others to see - so I will at least have left a mark to be remembered.
Paul… thank you so much for this contribution. I feel that anyone in our group here who doubts the point of persisting with their solitary writing work will get courage and perspective from this: you are writing from your values, and you have measures of worth that are not dependent on a single gatekeeper within a big publishing house. We share a sense of meaning got from knowing our work is available to be discovered in a range of places - I love that my audio book exists with my west country accent reading it; also that copies of the print book are in the country’s five copyright libraries - this means more to me than any of the more traditional markers of success/worth that attend a book being published. And if I ever had something in a Museum collection like you then I would also be very proud.
Love that sentiment Tanya. Thanks so much for creating this space and for taking your time to comment in such a positive and uplifting way. Hope you've ensured this space is saved too. You'll have given so many people hope and inspiration to continue doing their writing at times that without you, they'll have probably quit. All best wishes, Paul
I write sometimes but not enough of the time. I write so that maybe someone I don’t know will read what I have written and feel something unexpected. I write because I’m tired of not writing. I write to tell the cosmos that I exist, to remind essence that I miss it and I want to come back home having done the one thing that gnawed at my heart when I felt at my most peaceful on this planet. I write to express things like I have in that last sentence without feeling overly foolish or fraudulent. I write because of Mary Oliver, Banana Yoshimoto and John Berger.
I write because I’m trying to make sense of what it is to be alive, to unravel perceived ”norms”, to try to make sense of madness and injustice. I write in an effort to untangle my thoughts, to recalibrate my wandering and frayed nervous system. I write to try to understand the polarities that exist in me and in the world and to make sense of why these schisms exist. I write to explore some of the themes that intrigue me like power, relationships, trauma, beauty, violence and sadness. I write as a counter-poison to the viciousness of capitalism.
I write so that I might re- ignite the feeling of sheer pleasure when as a kid my Father would ask my sister and me to write a story for him on a slow Saturday afternoon, that same warm feeling that came over me even when my brute of a junior school teacher would set us a story for homework. I found writing stories to be a reprieve from the trauma of being in school where we were treated horribly, like some kind of inadequate grown-ups. I write in an effort to stir this sleeping sloth within me that is my courage.
I find writing challenging in many ways. I carry some kind of flawed internal ancestral pattern, a skewed template if you will, a result of my parent’s deep emotional distress and ensuing missed opportunities. Instead of spurring me onwards, a dearth of confidence holds me back. This is not a cry for pity. It’s just a fact that growing up surrounded by deeply unhappy people, people who despite that fact I loved dearly, has nonetheless stymied my ability to create freely.
Writing craves time. Periods of non-productivity spent languishing in the liminal land of ideas are as necessary to the work as hours spent typing and editing. This capitalist world is not conducive to idea time. Humans need to spend a lot of time at work in order to do all the things to sustain us before we dare to sit down to create.
Fear of censorship including that of self-censorship challenges my writing. The fear of getting it wrong and that of not being sufficiently courageous or worse, talented enough to see the thing through makes writing difficult. Everything is a challenge to writing but here I am…
Aoife... what a strong piece this is from you, and I responded so fully to how writing is for you (as for me, as for Berger - who we have in common) about both global/historical forces that pull us outwards into engagement with what is beyond us... and then that centripetal pull into the inner lives/histories of our parents, our ancestors. It really is a life's work to learn how to work with the push and pull of these things, while also trying to find those still points where we can attempt to write down what we've thought. This is why I created this space - a place where in small pockets of time between work, between caring, you and others can make short 'raids on the unspeakable' (to use or perhaps misuse Merton's phrase).
And when you mention your parents', their unhappiness, I thought immediately of the jug in your earlier piece for the project. How much was contained it: that piece and the object itself.
I found the other day an email document I created in the years of my full-time office work - I'd add paragraphs every now and then when other colleagues weren't looking, and it always felt so risky, conscientious as I was. At the time I was only aware of the gaps... how much life I was failing to record, to articulate... in one entry I'm just learning of our infertility, then in the next it's IVF, then I'm pregnant, and so on. Time lapses. But now of course I find what I wrote so rich in detail that I wouldn't be able to recreate now.
In whatever small grabs of time you have, do please write for other themes in the project. I love your prose and will be so interested to learn more about your story
Thanks so much for taking the time to respond to this Tanya, I really appreciate it.
Im painfully aware of the "gaps" and the correspdonding overwhelm that often ensues when i think about time that I've lost leaning into fear and self doubt and all that tedious stuff that maybe until recently I thought kept me safe from the risk you speak of.
Im so relieved for you that you took the leap that you did, I know you speak about your NDE as having spurred it all on, but you didnt have to respond to your own calling, you chose to step up! Im dallying with my choices still but definitely closer to diving in. Thanks again :)
Yes, the NDE brought a much longer concern over not following my calling into sharp focus… and yet it took a good seven years more to start finding a way to fully move forwards. And even then it was so slow, and through such obscure small steps rather than any big leap forwards! I love my husband’s saying: ‘slow and steady wins the race’. xx
Hello Aoife. Just a quick note to say I'm only just home from an intensive residential in Yorkshire last week where I was without my laptop. It will take me a few days to give all the new pieces, including yours, the time they deserve. But I wanted you to know your piece has been received by me and I will read it and respond properly by Wednesday. Tanya xx
The story begins a long time ago. Long before you and I were born. Long before our parents met. Long before our grandparents grew old.
The story begins generations ago. In a land and time long gone. In languages and cultures that have changed beyond recognition. Inside of me it lives on.
The story begins a long time ago. But it continues to unfurl day in day out, its threads run through the tapestry of day-to-day existence: a bold crimson here, an ugly grey there, a faltering gold, a steadfast green, here are the threads that make up who I am, the threads that can be traced back across the years through the people the lands and times that made me who I am, and every day the story grows, a soft and steady amorphous mass, this is who I am who I am who I am.
Why do I write? Because when I write I take up the mantle and make it mine, when I write I grasp these cloths and bring them close, the dim and dark, the silvery light, I take them up and draw them in, the tangled threads, the knotted yarn, I take them up and draw them close, this stuff of story, this story of mine. I dissect, I embroider, I shape.
I must write. I feel the draw so keen so clear, the tug at my heart the voice in my ear, you must you must you must you must. I muster up the will to try, I sit, I start, I falter. I must I must I must I must – do more. Before I sit before I start I must do this I must do that, an endless list a bottomless vat, I must do this I must do that.
My life: a mother, a doctor, a daughter, a wife. Fulfilling, so full, exhausting, time-poor. I simply don’t know how to create space for more. My baby cries, my body aches, chores pile up, anxieties aggregate. My world grows small. But the story goes on and on and on, the story calls, it wants to be told. I want to tell it before I grow old.
Oh Zofia... this piece is exquisite in the fairy-tale sense, where the richness of texture and colour and yearning has its shadow counterpart to cast everything into urgency: and this is what you do here in those last lines where you present day identity and duties fights your storytelling self for time. I know so well that life stage (although I'm finally not in it anymore as of this last half year, now that I've nursed my mother to end of life, and have children who can finally at 15 and 17 move between home and the wider world without always needing me). But I also know, from my own writing which survived that time to tell my family stories of generations, and more importantly from the strong pulse in your work (both this piece and the unforgettable one for the Voices theme), that you will tell all the stories that want you to tell them. And it's a powerful feeling to have created a space here where I and others get to read some of them. Thank you.
Hello Zofia. Just a quick note to say I'm only just home from an intensive residential in Yorkshire last week where I was without my laptop. It will take me a few days to give all the new pieces, including yours, the time they deserve. But I wanted you to know your piece has been received by me and I will read it and respond properly by Wednesday. Tanya xx
I’ll take you to where the writing started. Well, not exactly the place, but it was the reason. To a Nissan hut. A World War II relic that in 1979 was a cancer ward.
Imagine we are there, you and me. Sitting on old, paint-chipped waiting-room chairs, our legs dangling. Reader’s Digests piled on a formica table, their flimsy covers jostling for space alongside forgotten coffee cup stains.
You see that door? The one with the scuffed kick-plate and broken handle? Beyond it is a room with grey walls, a single bed and a ceiling light that’s never turned off. That’s where my dad will take his last breath, Mum by his side, men with 40-a-day coughs the backing track to his death.
It’s okay. It happened a long time ago. But it was then, in the months that followed, that I started writing. Thousands of words bled onto the pages of a cheap WH Smith notebook, silently, and without fuss from the rest of the family. "She’ll be ok," I heard them say under their breath.
But, for a time, death tainted me, as if losing a parent was catching or a smell to be kept at arm’s length. School friends stumbled over their words and writing became a refuge, a sanctuary from pity. The looping letters, the break from reality, losing myself for rare moments of clarity. It helped. So I wrote until I felt sane. Then stopped, and hid the notebooks away.
It seems crazy that I left it so long to write again, but life, as it annoyingly does, got in the way. I climbed the corporate ladder to so-called success. Bought a house, an open-topped car, fell into relationships; some good, some bad. Then fell out of them again. Writing was always there, in my mind. Stories as I walked or late at night before I slept. Until, one day, that wasn’t enough.
This time, the letters tumbled and played on the page like newly fledged birds. Gone was the grief, replaced by freedom of expression, a voice, a life half-lived and a couldn’t-care-less attitude to what others might think. I started a blog. Rambled on for post after post, and some people liked it. It won an award. I was proud, but didn’t know what to do next.
Fast forward to 2023. There are days when I never imagined I would get here. Married. Older. Forgetful. In some ways, freer than I’ve ever been, in other ways, more confined. Now, writing feels like a race against time. Time that’s dripping away too fast. Never enough hours, or days, or months to write everything down. But I must.
Jane...this is an absolutely compelling response from you. 'Imagine we are there, you and me' you say, and when I understand where you have taken me, and why, this place you have re-created so tangibly... then I had a surge of awe at your strength, then and now, both. To find inside yourself, through yourself, what you needed back then in those childhood years after your father's death, and to be able to return to there now for this piece: my deep respect.
And what a powerful feeling it is to have provided a space where some of your new-made work can be read by me and others. This piece sent me back to read all your previous ones, and they all resonate now even more than the first time from my understanding them now in a deeper context. The one in which you first formed as a writer.
I love this aspect of the writing life - how things seems to be drawn towards us like iron filings to magnets when we are or have just put something into story form! x
I had forgotten when I started writing until your prompt. It was a deep-seated love all those years ago but was buried. Although I put the notebooks away, there were dreams of going to university, becoming a journalist and writing for magazines in the years after that. It's just taken me fifty-odd years to get my act together. Thanks for your kind and perceptive comments, as always. I'm also intrigued by what I've read about your masterclasses. Sign me up! J xx
Ah thank you for interest in Masterclasses. I was getting very close to going live… and now I’m taking a bit longer to think it through. I need to be sure I’m offering something high value and sustainable for me to deliver if I’m going to be asking for money from you and others. My hyper-conscientious and also my very systems-oriented side needs to be fully assured. But it’s helpful to know it sounded of interest to you. xx
Hello Jane. Just a quick note to say I'm only just home from an intensive residential in Yorkshire last week where I was without my laptop. It will take me a few days to give all the new pieces, including yours, the time they deserve. But I wanted you to know your piece has been received by me and I will read it and respond properly by Wednesday. Tanya xx
Hello Tanya…think I’ve just posted something here..hope I have.
What can I say about Monday…what an honour and a privilege to meet you. I have to keep pinching myself. That was real. That was true. I love to think of you nearby, up the hill. I hope your week is going well. I shall never forget our meeting.. My son read what you’d written on Instagram, quietly and laboriously to himself ( he has severe dyslexia), and at the end just looked up and smiled. It’s good mum, he said.
I've just responded to your fierce and brilliant piece, but this as a PS to say how lovely that your son was able to read me and others saying how talented his mum is. Did you see what Amy Liptrot said about you too? That you were the star of her mothers who write course? xxx
He said it was our secret. He told me no-one would believe me. I was four years old, and I was silenced. I was a bridesmaid at his wedding. There’s a photograph taken outside the church, his hand resting on my shoulder like a clamp. I look terrified. After the wedding, he moved abroad with his wife, my auntie. The trauma didn’t go away, but I knew what I had to do. I have no recollection of this, but my mum told me recently that I begged her to teach me to read before I started school. I knew. I knew where I wanted to go to be safe. I wanted stories. I wanted words on the page, words that would take me somewhere else.
I read everything I could lay my hands on. I read under the covers at night. I read in the far corners of the playing field attached to our small village school. I copied my dad, an avid reader, who, if nothing else was available, would read the label of the HP sauce bottle on the table.
And I wrote my own stories. A very lovely teacher, Mr McNichol, read one out in class once. I was fifteen. He said it was the best story he’d read in a long time. I was mortified. All I felt was shame. I was supposed to be silent, and here were my words, being read out in public. My teachers wanted me to try for Oxford, to take the exam. I thought they were mad.
At university, not Oxford, the first in our family to go, I read and I read. I remember one December afternoon, sitting in a chair by the window of my bed sit, reading Mrs Dalloway. Devouring that book, the words of a magician, I thought. I was eating a packet of Viennese whirls. It got darker and darker, but I couldn’t get up to turn on the light. I was spellbound. How could she write such sentences, create scenes that felt so real. It was as if she was there in the room with me.
I have always kept a diary. For a long time, that was all I could do.
I was writing to bear witness. That question. Why do you write. Sometimes I just want to laugh out loud. I write because I have to. Because it’s like breathing. But most of all, thinking back to that four year old girl, I write because I want to be believed. I write to tell the truth. And because words saved me. The books that mean the most to me now are stories by women: Maggie Nelson, Virginia Woolf, Annie Ernaux, Emilie Pine, Kerri ni Dochartaigh, Amy Liptrot, and yes, you dear Tanya. Fiction or non-fiction, it doesn’t matter. I want the truth, and specifically, I want women’s truth.
Writing grounds me, settles me. I write to escape chaos, to process my trauma. Sometimes magic happens. Sometimes I despair.
At the end of the day it’s simple: I write because I want to tell my story.
This is so powerful and empowering. You did so much in such a short piece, it was so visual. This line: his hand resting on my shoulder like a clamp and the detailing with the packet of Viennese whirls. I don't have a literary background and always struggle to put to words what works in writing, but I know how my body responds when I read something that rings so true. I'm glad you shared this.
Dear and wonderful Kerry... I've just now read your words, just over a week since we were able to meet in your library that is a haven for so many (and you a large part of making it so). One of my other Ilkley mentees came on the Arvon course, and said how the Hebden library was where she was helped to set up her life in the UK many years ago, arriving alone and vulnerable from overseas.... I love these rippling circles of connection and caring, and you in so many of them (both Amy Liptrot and Bec Evans saw my post about our meeting, and both were thrilled to learn of our connection, saying online how talented you are).
What you've written here: that early and devastating violation you should never have had to experience... such anger I feel to think of that being done to you... equivalent only to the awe I feel for the child-you who found her own process and path to a kind of safety. One which has connected you to me and many others.
I'm working hard these last few weeks of the year to design an affordable year-long Masterclass that would run as a separate Substack. It would be one fee for all and no free places, as I'm keeping this project free for the long term and the new offering will be intensive, meaning I can't take on much other paid work beyond it. But I'm hoping it will be something that might interest you and be within reach financially: a place where you can connect more intensively than here with others who are taking their practice to the next levels with regards to aiming towards publication. More on that before end of year via a message to everyone here on the free Substack...
Are you also aware that Arvon Lumb Bank are going through a major redesign this coming year - architecturally but also in terms of broadening their accessibility to their regional and working-class writers. As a librarian at Hebden, and a local writer who embodies so much of that vision/plan, have you considered getting in touch with them to ask if there's a way you can come on board as a tutor/host? I'd be very happy to be a referee/to support your approach. If you decide to give that a try, let me know and I'd be happy to talk with you in the new year about how you might pitch that...
Tanya thank you as ever for your invaluable feedback. Am still pinching myself that we met. One of the best things that has happened for a very long time…and things are changing in a way I was beginning to despair would ever happen. My ex-partner is moving out tomorrow. I can’t believe I am writing that…but it is real. Next year is going to be special. And yes please! The masterclass sounds wonderful and I am most definitely interested…
And thank you for mentioning the Arvon stuff..but to be honest I don’t think I would have the energy for that..I just want to write and focus on that, and processing whatever comes up after these awful two years.
I met you! We had hugs! I have to write it to believe it but what an amazing day it was.
And yes, thank you, I did read what Amy had written in reply to your Instagram post..in fact, I sat next to her on the bus the other day and was able to thank her for her kind comments…
The Million Reasons Why I Write (or Ten for Starters)
There are a million reasons why I write. A love of hyperbole is one.
On a fundamental level I write because I like words. I adore sentences and syllables, and even have a fondness for individual letters. When those building blocks of language are constructed with a certain rhythm, be it soaring cadence or bradycardic pulse, I can be wonderstruck at the beauty. When a kind friend compliments me on my post-chemo appearance, and I reply: “I think I look like a dumpy, grumpy, Aberdonian farmer,” they worry about my self-esteem, whilst I am revelling in the musicality of my self-description.
I write because I am deficient. The legacy of being born with disordered internal plumbing are distinguishing features that make verbal communication fraught: I laugh like Muttley; I cough daily making a sound more seal-like than human; and I speak with a broken voice that (mis)suggests an eighty-a-day habit. On the phone I’m asked to spell word after word, and in person confused listeners infer what I’ve said rather than ask for a repeat. But writing words on a page: crystal clear.
My cerebral wiring is also a little off. It was with relief that I realised during a lecture that there was a name – aphantasia - for the way my mind’s eye works without pictures; a name for the way my imagination uses words not images to make sense of the world; a reason that my day dreams are literal rather than figurative.
In my other life, when I’m not a writer and not a patient, I’m a doctor. Friends have said “the contrast must be nice” but to me there is not contrast, but synergy. To practice medicine requires empathy to be at the heart of a consultation. And writing is always an act of radical empathy, as I try to tell stories from behind a character’s eyes (especially when that character is me). Trying to understand words, actions, emotions, joys and sorrows: I write from the inside out. I practice empathy with both the stethoscope and the pen.
My obstacles are more mundane than poetic. There is the less admirable (another episode of Gilmore Girls to rewatch); the more relatable (too many books to read, friends to meet, family to care for); and then there’s the stage-hogging downright histrionic (lungs not fit for purpose, breast cancer, and toxic treatments that try to keep me alive). Despite the more dramatic latter list, I deserve no sympathy. I’ve had enough well and free days for me to have put Dickens to shame. The biggest obstacle is time: when I was younger, I believed that the days really were endless, now I am older I navigate paralysing fears that there are too few days left.
But I keep writing. I write because I don’t know how not to. I write because I am a human, who builds her world with words: I meditate with words. I grieve with words. I love with words. My writing is me.
Jane... this is such exciting writing. I've read you aloud to enjoy still more what you love, and me also, though I've never expressed it with the dash and determination of you here:
'When those building blocks of language are constructed with a certain rhythm, be it soaring cadence or bradycardic pulse, I can be wonderstruck at the beauty. When a kind friend compliments me on my post-chemo appearance, and I reply: “I think I look like a dumpy, grumpy, Aberdonian farmer,” they worry about my self-esteem, whilst I am revelling in the musicality of my self-description.'
...bradycardic pulse... dumpy, grumpy, Aberdonian farmer... yes, I understand you, and share this attention to the sounds of language and how it almost always creates the meaning in turn.
What you say about writing as an act of radical empathy. Also the aphantasia (which I have too, and my daughter). So much here that I hope you've already written about in more depth, and can send me the link to, if you have and it's in some public space.
I will be reviewing all the pieces received to this prompt over the Christmas holidays and letting everyone know in the early year who I've chosen for the free mentoring session. If that isn't you, then I'd still love to find a way for you and I to talk more, if you'd like that too...
Thank you so much for this Tanya. It's just perfect timing. I ended up in hospital at the beginning of the week and as is usual, am now discharged and down and wondering where the words went and what is the point in them anyways. (I'm a teenager at heart really!) This was just the feedback I needed to remember that the words give me so much, and I'll get back to them when I'm ready.
Would love to find a way to speak at some point (though laughing cause currently mute - broken voice has given up with this infection!)
I saw an instagram post by you which made me concerned you were seriously ill, above and beyond your already-testing cancer treatment. You write with such strength, such rhythm... perhaps it's precisely at this time when your life and voice is being broken by illness that your written words will insist on speaking... and how glad I am that you may share more of them here.
I'm very close to turning on a paid subscription option on here for the new year - creating a new section within this Substack for a Masterclass Series, and only post within that will be for paid subscribers. I've decided that this story-sharing part needs to remain free.
Letting you know as I'm concerned your pledge will deduct from your account automatically, and I shouldn't wish you to pay for being here in this original and enduring part of the programme. Although if you want to join the Masterclass once you've read about it, then of course I'd love to have you as a paid subscriber for that - it's going to be a way I can give more full online mentoring to those here who want to take their creative practice and craft to the next level...
Thanks Tanya! Ended up in hospitial with a nasty infection (the anti cancer treatment continues to challenge my immune system!) Thanks for the heads up. WIll definitely be looking to enrol in the masterclass x
Just a quick note to say I'm teaching an intensive residential in Yorkshire this week and I'm without my laptop. But I wanted you to know your piece has been received by me and I will read it and respond properly when I'm home after the 4 December. Tanya x
I'm home now and have the pleasure of your piece ahead of me tomorrow afternoon. But before then I wanted to say how surprised and moved I was by your making a pledge should this project ever become a paid one, and even more so by what you've said. I'm not going to be accepting pledges for this Substack, I've decided (and my husband agrees!) as I want this to be a place where anyone finding it can always join in free of charge and build their creative confidence.
But I'd be very proud to use your words on my social media and websites, if I may, to speak for what the project offers?
And I am spending the last weeks of this year thinking about how I can start a separate smaller Masterclass substack that would be for paid subscribers only, in which I can share more fully everything I've learnt in the last 7 years - with monthly exercises covering everything from writing good author bios to the craft of writing and on into aspects of getting published and speaking to one's work in public. It's likely to be around £100 a year, and I will use this Substack to let all my current subscribers know. But yes, it feels important to me to keep this one fully open access - but the fact that you value you it so has helped me belief the Masterclass substack might find some subscribers.
It's both scary and exciting to start planning this week how the monthly Masterclasses could work... but the excitement is greater than the fear, as I want to teach/workshop craft and professional aspects of publishing as much as I still value supporting creative confidence. My week teaching at Arvon was my first chance to go deeply into craft with students, and it's reminded me how passionate I am about that and creative practice/process.
If I do go ahead, it will be in large part because of your perfectly-timed and very generous pledge and words of support.
My Dad was a story teller, short sweet nuggets of joy, delicately timed and spun just like a melody, starting with the low hum of a conspiratorial whisper, arching like a wave to curl back in on itself like a comic pear drop. The grace of the angler with his lift and cast, the eyes on the conjuror of the magic trick, attention transfixed, a bubble crafted in miniature. I would sit caught in the eddy with fizzy expectation, ready for the final line and euphoric break of laughter. He would watch the greats, Hancock and Sellers and I, in turn, would watch him. The intonation, the melodic rise and fall, the choreographed twitches and flex of his facial muscles; all soaked with gentle, kind humanity and love of his fellow man. When I had stories to tell at the end of the day, little observations squirreled away for later, I would snuggle into the familiar shape of him; happy to spin a story just for a minute or two; just for the lone ears of one or two.
And so, when the audience has been few or silent and the times and opportunities have not bent, I have wriggled my toes into more gritty, deeper ground. Rolling words around like marbles, feeling their texture and shape as they dance along my tongue - sliding and melting into sharp and dusty corners where thoughts and feelings bide their time. Satisfying the greed of all the many lives I will not live, to knead around inside myself so many mirrors of me, of we, of us, of all. To heal, to grieve, to fabricate and play the clown, to shout and shock and to rejoice. A chance to mould and shape without critique; to strip, dissect and let my anger disembowel all shocking truths upon the page.
I spin the thread for just a while, a nod to melody and shape. Still short - a bite. How could I presume to harness a soul for a page or more? Indeed, it would be foolish to think I could or, perhaps, it is just cowardice to think I could not? Perhaps I write for the thrill deep down that I may one day stray further than I should, believe in a story that could be told, feel the chill and loneliness of unfamiliar territory and risk no audience…or worse yet, ears that shun and leave. Margaret Attwood once said, if you don’t have a story, don’t write. I feel I have a thousand that swim around me unseen and unstructured…ready to morph me into shapes unknown if I am brave enough to stop the jig I dance around the edges, to resurface in stranger lands with compass lost and no way back. A traveller of sorts, if my soul will stretch that far…?
Oh Louise... I'm home now in Sussex after my week teaching at Arvon in Yorkshire, and how strange it has been to know there was a new piece by you I couldn't read til now...
...and what a pleasure it is to be back with your words again now. The thrill I got the first time you wrote for the project is there still, but with the deepening sense now that you will find a longer form also for these stories you have.
When you write about your father, the fatherless child and woman that I am yearns to stay with you for the length of a book... I am hungry for this kind of story, and when you write of him and you in relation/response to him there is such joy and beauty in your work.
There's a shadow side to that story too, I know, in other relationships, but that too you have a skill in exploring.
Such strong feeling reading this paragraph:
'How could I presume to harness a soul for a page or more? Indeed, it would be foolish to think I could or, perhaps, it is just cowardice to think I could not? Perhaps I write for the thrill deep down that I may one day stray further than I should, believe in a story that could be told, feel the chill and loneliness of unfamiliar territory and risk no audience…'
Admiring your writing as I do, I want to be back across from you at a cafe table once more so I can ask, gently, whether there might be a position midway between foolishness and cowardice that can serve you in writing that longer story about another soul? I recognise both of those positions from my own journey, of course, but having now made a book in which my mother's life is honoured, and my husband's, my beloved Granny's too... oh it's a good deep feeling. A quiet joy that means more to me than any of the more obvious rewards of publication. And I'd love for you to experience it too.
Dear Tanya, thank you so much for your words, and your kindness and support, it feels profound and thrilling that I could risk a little more. It would be wonderful if my travels take me your way again next year and you could prompt and inspire me over a cafe table once more - as the year draws to a close, wishing you and your family a peaceful Christmas and thank you so much for the gift of this space xxx
I was just now looking through my paper by month calendar (something I do at every end of year, to remember all the work projects I've done and new people met). We met in the very early weeks of this year - which took me aback as it still feels so fresh in my mind! xxx
Just a quick note to say I'm teaching an intensive residential in Yorkshire this week and I'm without my laptop. But I wanted you to know your piece has been received by me and I will read it and respond properly when I'm home after the 4 December. Tanya x
I write to make sense of myself. I write for myself and I write to be read.
I love writing, I love reading. I especially love reading letters other people's letters, journals and diaries, including my own letters and journals which speak of a time and a place, of the people in my life and my experience of myself in relation to them.
My biggest challenge is writing a memoir. I attend workshops, courses, and read loads of memoirs. I think I have found my thread, and know what I am weaving only for it to unravel again, and again.
I write to people I know and love, and who love me: emails, WhatsApp messages, e-letters, and carefully chosen occasion cards - birthday, thank you, thinking of you. I write me to you, and who you are shapes what and how I write. As I write I hold you in mind, and I hold you close, I care about you and what I am writing to you.
I write for and to connect with people I don't know, or don't know yet, emails, blogs, articles, posts on LinkedIn related to my work, to what I do, to what matters to me. I have written two books, both related to my work. The first 'Developing Assertiveness', is a book about developing self-confidence, belief in yourself. I write as a conversation me to you. I am the source material for this writing to you, but it is not about me.
My second book a longer, bigger book 'Assertiveness and Diversity' is all about developing confidence in ourselves and others, and creating a safe environment for people in which they can be themselves with each other, accepted for who they are. It is a me to you book. It is a more formal, academic, and researched book in which I share the work of others, and personal stories of others. They, more than me, are the source material.
I am the source material in a book of early life stories, called 'Children Growing Up with Religion' about the impact of an early religious upbringing on later life. I wrestled for ages about whether to write under a pseudonym, and encouraged by the vast majority of other writers, wrote with my own name. Both my parents were alive and I gave them my chapter to read before it was published. I am not sure that my mother really understood that I had written it for other people; my father did and he was proud of me, that I had come along way and he had no issues with it. I sent it to my sister, I felt worried that she might take 'Umbridge', instead she commented on my lack of punctuation and some other grammatical errors. I laughed with relief and gratitude.
I write lists, which I don't keep. I write one words on them, things to do, people to contact, stuff. I tick things off as I do them throughout the day. Sometimes the names of people don't get crossed off and go onto a new piece of paper, they join a new group. Some names get written again, and again.
Anni... how good to have you join us here, and particularly after our rich conversation for your podcast, in which the focus was - at your invitation - on my work, even while I found myself wanting to be talking more about yours!
What you say about the memoir in progress and how it weaves then unravels: I read this from you just minutes after looking out the long editorial letter I received on handing in the second draft of TCFS! How much it changed after that - me having to find a way to reweave my material to satisfy all of my editors' very fine questions. When we meet to walk and talk I can bring it as an artefact for you to look over - to show that the amount of reworking that goes on.
Moved by what you say about sharing your piece on religious upbringings with your parents: there's not many of us who will experience that strange mix of emotions that go with making our written/public voice known to our closest family.
This is the only monthly prompt I'm not curating into the story archive, as I've wanted to spend time suggesting strategies and resources to those who use their replies to indicate struggles or a wish for support. But if you write for any of the other themes, it will be such a pleasure to add your name and your words to the collection.
I write because my thoughts become muddled as they form into speech. I open my mouth, sounds come out, but they don’t reflect the meaning in my head. The disconnect between my brain and my words has been with me always. My neurones, with their out-of-kilter connections, have never been studied or diagnosed or labelled. As a child, I was simply odd, a loner with an empty chair by my side. I knew I was different to the others. I stood on the fringes, observing the children who knew what to say.
Long childhood hours were spent creating projects, keeping creepy crawlies and writing, writing, writing. When written words spilled out, like magic they were in the right order, struck the right note, and they danced unselfconsciously in the sunshine without any awkwardness at all.
Fifty years on, spoken words still falter from my mouth in that familiar jumbly, erratic fashion and a spotlight shines on me as I know all the time people are looking at me, wondering who is this strange woman and her blurted-out words.
But give me a pen and the tap is turned on. Words flow out onto the paper and nowadays the keyboard, like molten lava, and I know they represent exactly what my fizzing brain is saying. The words aren’t fully formed or polished or even making sense, but they are the ingredients from which something will eventually emerge, sometimes slowly and painfully like a butterfly unfolding its damp brand-new wings, at other times popping out into the world like a baby seal, slick and perfectly formed.
When I write I can feel the mask, the one I wear to fit in, falling away until it’s barely there. I don’t need to concentrate on how to compose my face, to make sure I look you in the eye, or whether my comments are acceptable or ill-judged. I don’t have to pretend I am someone else.
When I don’t write, I’m bottled up like a blocked pipe. Stifled, as if I’m wearing a surgical mask, all communication muffled.
So why, sometimes, do I stop writing? I feel like it’s a kind of punishment. I know writing mends me, but there are times I don’t want to be healed. I must write, but an invisible wall lies between my thoughts and my hands. My words are sucked away in a vortex of gloom.
I have strategies now, writery friends and Tanya’s thoughtful prompts, to gently ease me away from such stupor. And now, even, I have shared my words. The inner workings of my mind have been read by others. At first that idea was as impossible as jumping from a cliff, but slowly the temptation to share grew like a seedling inside me, stronger and stronger as it reached towards the light. I danced around the idea, a moth drawn to a flame. Tempted but terrified.
Here you are. Yes! And how glad I am to have made a space where you feel safe and welcome. So much of what you so vividly describe from your childhood experience is true for me too - and part of why I have tried in each of my projects this last seven years to make a shared space alongside each of my solo endeavours. The child who didn't belong to any groups wanting to found them on the sort of terms that make others like me able to draw close. It means a lot to read your piece. Thank you.
In the middle of our seventh-floor apartment was a small, windowless room, a space where we were safe from typhoon winds strong enough to smash the windows in the flat. When a force eight storm warning looked likely, the one we children hoped for because then school was cancelled, my parents would attach a metal cross bar, which had suction pads on each corner, to the biggest window to reinforce it. There was a story, perhaps apocryphal, that a man had died there, shredded by glass as the enormous pane blew in.
That dark room was perfect as a mini photography studio. I stuck up black card and pinched lights from my brother’s desk, plundering my mother’s spice cupboard for my first composition. It was a world of rich pigments and textures and I tipped them into coloured heaps, moving the lamps to light them just so. One of those, the nutmeg, was a bit part player, tucked to one side because it was nothing special; greyish-brown and slightly wrinkled, neither big nor small. It didn’t have the long, glistening lines of the vanilla pod or the intricate folds of the cinnamon stick, nor the deep, hot-country hues of ground paprika and turmeric.
Years later as a student, and having failed my first-year exams, I made a six-pint rice pudding to feed myself as I revised for resits. I grated a nutmeg onto the top and was astonished by its internal beauty; dark brown, irregular lines weaving through a light brown canvas, like neural pathways on a brain scan. And, as I took it between my fingers and lifted it to my nose, an inhale revealed another dimension, a warm-spice world of countries, perspectives and languages. I was holding an idea between my fingers, turning it over and over, exploring its possibilities.
This is why I write. Because the smallest thing can blow open your world. Working in slow time, you can watch ideas and beliefs spin out and away from you, their edges stretching for meaning. You begin to see complexity; something that was just blue yesterday, reveals itself to be subtle shades today: midnight, Denim and French navy. And words offer you connections, not just with concepts but with people. Because as you roll through life’s daily interactions, with the experiences that mark you in ways that can be difficult to voice, you begin to understand yourself and the people around you. You can be better and do better, more confident about what matters.
But, it can be difficult to create the solitude to think, let alone write. I am raising children, keeping a marriage and extended family together, throwing my all into the daily demands of everyone else. Orchestrating spinning lives consumes almost all of me: laundry, meals, cleaning, homework; I am counsellor and confidante. But, I am also resisting, quietly redrawing boundaries and expectations, clinging on to a crack in wall. Inch by inch I am advancing towards that other dimension, the one with limitless edges.
So very moving to read this truly beautiful piece by you (full of both soul and craft) on my son's 17th birthday - that birth which set in motion the haemmorhage that almost took me away from him ten days later. And which also brought into urgency my need to find a way to reach beyond home and family and work. It took me so long, as you know, to find a way to share my words, but your words reaching me today is the most beautiful proof that I made it into that clearing where those of us who love words, stories, attention head for, hope for. Your words connect with me, yes. And I love that you are making your way to me and other readers 'inch by inch' as I did.
And what rich details you've given us: the six-pint rice pudding, the windowless middle room... and this passage in particular is gorgeous:
"This is why I write. Because the smallest thing can blow open your world. Working in slow time, you can watch ideas and beliefs spin out and away from you, their edges stretching for meaning. You begin to see complexity; something that was just blue yesterday, reveals itself to be subtle shades today."
This is the only theme in the collection where I'm not curating responses over in the permament archive - only so I can give time to those who respond with questions or feelings about writing which invite suggestions/recommendations from me. But I hope you will continue to write for other themes in the archive, as you have before - I will always enjoy seeing more of your work...
Thank you Tanya, for your support for all of us who share our words and thoughts here. And thank you too for the time you spend reading and commenting. Encouragement is uplifting - writing can be an uncertain process.
It's my absolute pleasure. I was very clear from my own first small published piece in 2015 that each time I undertook a project, I'd find ways to extend opportunities to others in turn. So each time you and others join me here, it's a special feeling! xx
So much easier to answer the question if it had been: ‘How do you write?’ Or ‘Where do you write?’ Or even ‘What?’ or ‘When?’ But ‘Why..?’ Why do I write?
The only answer is really: I write because I have to, because I need to.
It isn’t all the time. I’m not a writer who has a plan and who carefully plots out their day, deciding how many words shall hit the page this morning, how many paragraphs shall be the target for today, diligently typing or writing whilst letting the coffee go cold and social media un-scrolled, distractions ignored as work gets done and pride and satisfaction are achieved at the end of the allotted time. Oh, sometimes I wish I could write that way and oh, how much I admire those who do!
But I’m a writer who writes when something needs to burst out, when something I’ve seen or heard or felt has affected me profoundly and has become too much for me to hold inside any longer. The thought or idea taps at my chest, insisting that I find my words and set it free, like opening a cage for a captive bird.
It doesn’t happen all that often, but when it does, that urge, that drive just cannot be ignored and I must rush and find my pen, I must open my notebook and I must write this down.
I learned a while ago, from Jeff Tweedy who eloquently expresses this in song, that once a writer shares what they have to say, it belongs entirely to them no more, but to all who read it. That scared the hell out of me to begin with, because what if no one understood what I was trying to say, and it was ‘out there’ but no one liked it or wanted it? That it didn’t belong anywhere, or to anyone?
Then I remembered something else: that all the most wonderful writing that I have ever read made me feel deeply, touched me somewhere fundamental and visceral, often made me cry and brought me somehow to a recognition of myself and my connection to all things and all people. Because even if I didn’t see what the writer was describing in exactly the same way as they did, or if I didn’t feel the precise way that they did (perhaps because our experiences of life or our circumstances were different), nevertheless if their writing sparked something in me, then it became mine as well as theirs and the connection was forged. And from connection grows understanding, respect, compassion, empathy and love.
This is why I write: because I have a need to make connections. Because I want to share a thought, and idea or an experience in a way that touches someone and ignites a spark for them, in a way that brings feelings to the surface and sets them free.
... and your words from today have already reached their first receptive reader in me, here at my late afternoon kitchen table. And that's how I think of my writing too - a spark that someone might carry with them in straw until they need it to catch and kindle something in themselves. I love how you've articulated the urge that builds up, and how it always at last surges past any fear-thinking. What is the Tweedy song? We can add it to the ones we are going to sing when we meet!
This is the only prompt in the collection that I'm not curating responses for over on the book site, as I wanted to have time to give detailed resource and practice advice to those who showed a wish for it. But any others you write for will be curated as usual.
Thank you so much for your response, Tanya! I’m always amazed by how swiftly you get back to us and also how you really get to the heart of what we are writing and give us such compassionate and loving understanding. My gratitude is real!
The Tweedy song is ‘What Light’ and it’s on Wilco’s Sky Blue Sky Album. You probably know by now that I’ve lived much of my life to a Wilco soundtrack and that Jeff Tweedy is highly revered by me. I think singing one of his songs together would be really good and while I’m at it, I think we should include a Natalie Merchant (or 10,000 Maniacs) song on our set list. I was lucky enough to see her at the London Palladium last week and was blown away by her and her music - what an incredible woman!
One of my Mum’s proudest accomplishments is that she taught me to read at 3 years old. Now I have my own child I wonder at this accomplishment, the dedication it must have taken from her, and the fortitude from me, to sit quietly and learn my letters over and over again. The gift I am always grateful for – the ability to lose myself in books from a young age, books and their fantasy storylines becoming a lifeline in the dark. Hours lost in the pages of another world, the ability to disappear. A physical manifestation of the regular dissociation I practiced to escape the less salubrious activities that took place behind the closed doors of my childhood home.
The natural bedfellow of reading is writing. Soon writing became my second ally, a buoyancy aid that prevented me from drowning in the storms that raged within and around me. As a child, I rarely used my speaking voice. I had swallowed it whole as I did not trust what it would say. I did not trust that it was safe or that my truth would be, could be heard. As my vocal cords seized, writing became my voice. A safe and accepted means of expression, one within my control and dominion. A place where I could create my own beautiful fantasies, create pictures out of words, acceptable to others or kept private just for me.
For as long as I can remember I have written poems and then diaries. Hundreds upon hundreds of notebooks, thousands upon thousands of words detailing all that I am unable to say. The secrets, the unspoken truths, the mundane days and the detailed dreams and nightmares of my sleep. My worries and my fears. The joys, celebrations, hopes and dreams. Would I still be here if I had not had writing as my ally for all these years?
My writing is my voice, my writing is my voice, my writing is my voice.
Looking back now I see how, in the absence of others, my diaries can accept all my words. There is no shame in sharing on their blank pages and I am able to empty myself of the thoughts that would otherwise drown and unhinge me whilst also giving shape to my dreams.
My greatest challenge now, to write for others. To release my words on to public pages for all to see. To voice my truth on the stark white pages of a lit-up book; whispering, shouting, spewing my words on to the page. To finally give myself a voice, an unedited precedent, to allow myself to be seen and heard, to be authentically me, my story finally shared and set free.
How strongly I responded to this soul-full piece by you. What you say about reading being a buoyancy aid... oh yes, books as escape mechanisms for those of us in dangerous or just uncertain childhood homes, but I love how your particular image opens up such depth and dimension to that familiar experience. And how you've caught my imagination with your hundreds upon hundreds of notebooks... you sound, like me, and like so many of the fine emerging writers I now mentor, to have had what I call 'an overlong apprenticeship' - you've been training your ear, your muscles, your attention, for so long, but without a way to bring that to a readership.
But you're here now! And I suspect you will soon find - like so many who began here - that you'll find more and more ways to test your words out beyond those private pages now. It will be my pleasure to be a small part of helping that happen.
This is the only theme I'm not curating responses for over on the book site, and only because I want to give more time to suggesting further reading or techniques, for those who responses are asking for that.
It's not a cheap or easy book to get hold of, as it's an American import, but if you can afford it, do take a look at The Answers Are Inside The Mountain by poet William Stafford. He was first published after 40 but then went on to be his state's poet laureate. The book is a collection of his decades-long creative and teaching practice - it's such a wise and gentle companion for the time when we (like him) are moving out from a long diary-keeping practice into more public forms of expression...
I love that title 'The Answers a are Inside The Mountain' too. Will try and get hold of the book... Yes I have been apprenticing to this a long time, the idea of writing in public just a whisper who's strength is now growing x
Thank you Tanya for this project and for your kindness. It feels like a deep and treasured awakening to have my writing 'seen' and responded to after all this time. And even better by an author who's work and story has so inspired me! I really appreciate you opening this container. Chloë xx
If you’d asked me when I was a teenager why I wanted to write, I would have said: for the 10 percents. This is based on advice my Mom once gave me. She said that life is 10 percent ups, 10 percent downs, and 80 per cent in the middle. As an adolescent, I wanted to be a foreign correspondent and write about human misery, or to be like Hemingway and write beautiful novels on a tropical island, with a sweaty cocktail on the desk next to my typewriter. In other words, I wanted to write about the ten percents.
Instead, in my 50s, I continue to fill notebooks and computer files with the 80 percent. I write about the way the overhead light in my kitchen glints off yesterday’s plate, which is dusted with crumbs from the Halloween cookies we ate. I write about my digestive problems. I write about the fear that I’ll never be a proper writer because I never edit and share my work.
As it turns out, writing about the 80 percent is a lot easier than risking my life in war zones and witnessing a lot of suffering. Or dying of liver failure after too many rum and cokes in my house in the Bahamas. Plus, there’s a lot more material if you write about the 80 percent – exactly four times more, to be exact. While there will always be war and misery and astonishing sunsets over the Caribbean, there is a lot more harsh kitchen lighting and crumbs on plates and indigestion and longing. So despite my writerly teenage intentions, I have ended up writing entirely about the 80 percent of life that’s middling.
For example, when I was 23, I wrote about a laundromat in Cincinnati, Ohio. On the wall above the coin machine, there was a clock with a plastic cut-out of Elvis Presley in the middle. His arms were the clock’s arms, and his hips moved back and forth with each second. In the damp, noisy drone of the laundromat, it was just me and Elvis, shaking his hips, tick, tick, tick; one arm pointing to the 2 and the other at 35 past the hour. I sat in a yellow fiberglass chair with my journal on my lap. Clothes spun wildly in a dryer. At that same moment, my boyfriend was at home making black bean soup, steaming up the windows, in the attic apartment we rented from an old Chinese couple.
Little moments like that laundromat are peppered throughout my stacks of old notebooks. And now I see why. At the time, I was disappointed with my life, afraid I’d settled too soon. From the vantage point of years, I now see how perfect it was. The kitchy clock, the boyfriend, the poky apartment. All perfect and just as it was meant to be. It seems like a way to honour who I was and the life I was given.
Wendy - thank you so much for joining us here with this first and richly detailed piece: and you remind me all over again why notebooks are such a precious practice: however well we think we will remember life, it is the act of writing down the launderettes, the clothes in the dryer, the black bean soup that keeps it fully alive and accessible to us - even without needing to read it back often/ever. (I smiled at it in deep recognition too - one of my first dates with my husband of the last thirty years was at the campus launderette! We sat on top of the machines and sang Elvis Presley songs - so it's quite uncanny to read your piece now with so many similar motifs! Perhaps its the nature of young love: we eat soup, we don't own washing machines... but the Elvis bit! That's magic!).
This is the only theme in the three-year archive where I'm not curating responses over on my book's website: this so that I can give more time to responses where someone has identified a difficulty with their writing life where I can point to useful resources/perspectives. But if you write for other themes in the project - as I very much hope you will, enjoying your prose style here as I do - then it will be my pleasure to add your words to the collection.
And can I say how lovely it is to see you taking time to read and respond to others' words with such generosity and attention. That is an aspect of the project that makes it more than the sum of parts I could bring into being on my own - and it really matters to people: its often the first time they are feeling their stories being received by strangers. Precious. Thank you.
Thanks so much for your generous comments, Tanya. I'm so excited to finally join this community of writers -- I first heard about it at a workshop you taught at the Chipping Norton Lit Festival a year or two ago. I look forward to posting and commenting on some of the past themes.
Ah! How lovely to know we were in the same time/place together. I loved that workshop so much. And Louise Stead who is a regular contributor here was there that day too...
I suppose there is an easy answer for this prompt: I write because I can’t not write. My fingers will always find the pen and paper and fill it with a scrawled script; a make-shift map to my minds eye. I have done this since I was little and I can’t begin to fathom how may pages I’ve filled, how much ink I’ve used, how many pencils I’ve worn down to a stub. And that doesn’t account for the notes in my phone, the word documents on my computer, or the multi-coloured post it notes that fall out of books. But it’s not quite as simple as that is it?
These ramblings carve out my joys, my fears, my hopes, my resentments, my dreams, my half-hatched plans for building a life. But at the end of it all, that is all they are. They are ramblings. Some are random segments of chain whose links don’t seem to have the right fastenings to clip together, others resemble tangled necklaces at the bottom of a dusty jewellery box. I read them back sometimes and think ok great, but what now? Usually at this time a voice starts to whisper in my head, a voice that sounds like mine but isn’t, breathing the words, this is pointless, over and over and over again.
Other times I read my words and get frustrated with myself for only recording a surface-level sensation. It feels as though I’m censoring myself, as though I can only dive a certain depth under my own skin before I’m forced back to the surface – unsatisfied that I have left something unexplored, unsaid. This is another trigger for that voice, see you can’t do it, see you have nothing to say, see this is pointless. Louder this time. Whining on and on until it can’t be ignored. Until those words become my own. Until I stop reaching for the pen. Until I can’t write.
My mind does not still, the words race around as furious as wasps trapped in a pint glass. The buzz continues until my depression grips hold and my insides start to fill with thick black treacle. That usually stops the wasps, but it usually stops me as well. I could be out a couple of days, a couple of weeks, or a good few months. Eventually my fingers twitch for the pen again; or the keyboard, like today, when I searched for a prompt to bring me back to the page, to write myself back to me.
So, I guess I write to make sense of it all, and I’m trying not to worry about fitting all the fragments together, or the things that truly scares me the most: what if I can’t stop writing, but what if I never find a way to make sense of it? What if there’s no book in me? What if I’ve peaked and from here on out it’s just this weird relentless cycle of words, wasps, and thick black treacle?
I feel sure that, like me, others reading this will feel grateful to you, Jenni, for giving such visceral shape to something so many of us experience - that voice which makes it sometimes so hard to do meaningful work. It reminds me to go back to an essay called Serious Noticing by James Wood (I think), where he talks about how the world never wanted our stories… or rather it wants stories, but of a particular kind, easily monetised… he doesn’t offer any easy fix for the struggle to put our stories in the world, but like your words, it reminds me that while writing can often be full of flow and pleasure and purpose, othertimes we have to experience a sense of absurdity, of struggle… If I find a link to it later, I’ll put it here in case it’s of interest. xx
That sounds like a really interesting essay, I will search it out. It's such a tricky one to balance, and deep down you know it's a balancing act, that will level out eventually but it doesn't make those struggles any easier. We're all on that creative rollercoaster in one way or another. It felt good to be honest about it though, to admit that I put so much of my self-worth on my writing is a scary demon to look at, but clearly I need to examine it.
I suppose there is an easy answer for this prompt: I write because I can’t not write. My fingers will always find the pen and paper and fill it with a scrawled script; a make-shift map to my minds eye. I have done this since I was little and I can’t begin to fathom how may pages I’ve filled, how much ink I’ve used, how many pencils I’ve worn down to a stub. And that doesn’t account for the notes in my phone, the word documents on my computer, or the multi-coloured post it notes that fall out of books. But it’s not quite as simple as that is it?
These ramblings carve out my joys, my fears, my hopes, my resentments, my dreams, my half-hatched plans for building a life. But at the end of it all, that is all they are. They are ramblings. Some are random segments of chain whose links don’t seem to have the right fastenings to clip together, others resemble tangled necklaces at the bottom of a dusty jewellery box. I read them back sometimes and think ok great, but what now? Usually at this time a voice starts to whisper in my head, a voice that sounds like mine but isn’t, breathing the words, this is pointless, over and over and over again.
Other times I read my words and get frustrated with myself for only recording a surface-level sensation. It feels as though I’m censoring myself, as though I can only dive a certain depth under my own skin before I’m forced back to the surface – unsatisfied that I have left something unexplored, unsaid. This is another trigger for that voice, see you can’t do it, see you have nothing to say, see this is pointless. Louder this time. Whining on and on until it can’t be ignored. Until those words become my own. Until I stop reaching for the pen. Until I can’t write.
My mind does not still, the words race around as furious as wasps trapped in a pint glass. The buzz continues until my depression grips hold and my insides start to fill with thick black treacle. That usually stops the wasps, but it usually stops me as well. I could be out a couple of days, a couple of weeks, or a good few months. Eventually my fingers twitch for the pen again; or the keyboard, like today, when I searched for a prompt to bring me back to the page, to write myself back to me.
So, I guess I write to make sense of it all, and I’m trying not to worry about fitting all the fragments together, or the things that truly scares me the most: what if I can’t stop writing, but what if I never find a way to make sense of it? What if there’s no book in me? What if I’ve peaked and from here on out it’s just this weird relentless cycle of words, wasps, and thick black treacle?
I can’t think of a worse thing than having existed on this planet yet leaving it without making a mark; as if I’d never been here at all.
To me, it’s our purpose, the sole reason for our creation, to make change, improve things, enlighten and do something noteworthy before we die.
My favourite quotes of all time come from Londoners who have long since left this earthly plane, the most used, Dr. Samuel Johnson’s, who shuffled off this mortal coil in 1784:
“When a man is tired of London he is tired of life, for there is in London all that life can afford”
He wasn’t wrong then, he isn’t wrong now.
The diarist Samuel Pepys, gone in 1703, tells us more of everyday life of his time in the moments he caught in ink, than anything else:
“... I did dig another [pit], and put our wine in it: and I, my Parmazan cheese, as well as my wine and some other things”
And the great caricaturist William Hogarth although adding pictures to words, departed 1764, traps moments in history that are easily seen in our modern day personalities:
“I have generally found that persons who have studied painting least were the best judges of it.”
Written words capture the essence of time better than anything else, and that is the reason I write.
I’m currently working on my memoir, Fighting The Dreamkillers, which is a work that explores how I use the culture I consume to become more enlightened and educated when it comes to a specific subject. Each of my chapters starts with a list, 1.Music, 2.Theatre, 3.Book, 4.Art. 5.Exhibition & 6.Film that relates to it.
Take my chapter on money, Abba let me know the perception of the societal fight of being poor, David Hare on the Stage of the National Theatre explained the insanity of money markets, The Big Short, a film, spelt out the Financial Crash and the lie that created it,
The other book I’m writing, Why Don’t People Help?: The Decline of Civil Society & How We Can Reverse It, is the one I hope has the most impact on public consciousness after I’m gone. It’s an explanation of how Britain has lost its way when it comes to community and how we can individually do things to put that right. We blame too much on the state and do too little ourselves.
But if that comes to naught I’ll still have achieved my goal.
My video diary is in the Museum of London’s permanent collection, my written electric diaries, social media and emails are being collected into the London Metropolitan Archive over the coming months, I have a Cartoon, a collaboration with Private Eye cartoonist Mike Stokoe, in the Cartoon Museum.
So like my former counterparts, my words are already saved. Will they matter? Only time will tell, but they’re there for others to see - so I will at least have left a mark to be remembered.
Paul… thank you so much for this contribution. I feel that anyone in our group here who doubts the point of persisting with their solitary writing work will get courage and perspective from this: you are writing from your values, and you have measures of worth that are not dependent on a single gatekeeper within a big publishing house. We share a sense of meaning got from knowing our work is available to be discovered in a range of places - I love that my audio book exists with my west country accent reading it; also that copies of the print book are in the country’s five copyright libraries - this means more to me than any of the more traditional markers of success/worth that attend a book being published. And if I ever had something in a Museum collection like you then I would also be very proud.
Tanya xx
Love that sentiment Tanya. Thanks so much for creating this space and for taking your time to comment in such a positive and uplifting way. Hope you've ensured this space is saved too. You'll have given so many people hope and inspiration to continue doing their writing at times that without you, they'll have probably quit. All best wishes, Paul
I write sometimes but not enough of the time. I write so that maybe someone I don’t know will read what I have written and feel something unexpected. I write because I’m tired of not writing. I write to tell the cosmos that I exist, to remind essence that I miss it and I want to come back home having done the one thing that gnawed at my heart when I felt at my most peaceful on this planet. I write to express things like I have in that last sentence without feeling overly foolish or fraudulent. I write because of Mary Oliver, Banana Yoshimoto and John Berger.
I write because I’m trying to make sense of what it is to be alive, to unravel perceived ”norms”, to try to make sense of madness and injustice. I write in an effort to untangle my thoughts, to recalibrate my wandering and frayed nervous system. I write to try to understand the polarities that exist in me and in the world and to make sense of why these schisms exist. I write to explore some of the themes that intrigue me like power, relationships, trauma, beauty, violence and sadness. I write as a counter-poison to the viciousness of capitalism.
I write so that I might re- ignite the feeling of sheer pleasure when as a kid my Father would ask my sister and me to write a story for him on a slow Saturday afternoon, that same warm feeling that came over me even when my brute of a junior school teacher would set us a story for homework. I found writing stories to be a reprieve from the trauma of being in school where we were treated horribly, like some kind of inadequate grown-ups. I write in an effort to stir this sleeping sloth within me that is my courage.
I find writing challenging in many ways. I carry some kind of flawed internal ancestral pattern, a skewed template if you will, a result of my parent’s deep emotional distress and ensuing missed opportunities. Instead of spurring me onwards, a dearth of confidence holds me back. This is not a cry for pity. It’s just a fact that growing up surrounded by deeply unhappy people, people who despite that fact I loved dearly, has nonetheless stymied my ability to create freely.
Writing craves time. Periods of non-productivity spent languishing in the liminal land of ideas are as necessary to the work as hours spent typing and editing. This capitalist world is not conducive to idea time. Humans need to spend a lot of time at work in order to do all the things to sustain us before we dare to sit down to create.
Fear of censorship including that of self-censorship challenges my writing. The fear of getting it wrong and that of not being sufficiently courageous or worse, talented enough to see the thing through makes writing difficult. Everything is a challenge to writing but here I am…
Aoife... what a strong piece this is from you, and I responded so fully to how writing is for you (as for me, as for Berger - who we have in common) about both global/historical forces that pull us outwards into engagement with what is beyond us... and then that centripetal pull into the inner lives/histories of our parents, our ancestors. It really is a life's work to learn how to work with the push and pull of these things, while also trying to find those still points where we can attempt to write down what we've thought. This is why I created this space - a place where in small pockets of time between work, between caring, you and others can make short 'raids on the unspeakable' (to use or perhaps misuse Merton's phrase).
And when you mention your parents', their unhappiness, I thought immediately of the jug in your earlier piece for the project. How much was contained it: that piece and the object itself.
I found the other day an email document I created in the years of my full-time office work - I'd add paragraphs every now and then when other colleagues weren't looking, and it always felt so risky, conscientious as I was. At the time I was only aware of the gaps... how much life I was failing to record, to articulate... in one entry I'm just learning of our infertility, then in the next it's IVF, then I'm pregnant, and so on. Time lapses. But now of course I find what I wrote so rich in detail that I wouldn't be able to recreate now.
In whatever small grabs of time you have, do please write for other themes in the project. I love your prose and will be so interested to learn more about your story
Txx
Thanks so much for taking the time to respond to this Tanya, I really appreciate it.
Im painfully aware of the "gaps" and the correspdonding overwhelm that often ensues when i think about time that I've lost leaning into fear and self doubt and all that tedious stuff that maybe until recently I thought kept me safe from the risk you speak of.
Im so relieved for you that you took the leap that you did, I know you speak about your NDE as having spurred it all on, but you didnt have to respond to your own calling, you chose to step up! Im dallying with my choices still but definitely closer to diving in. Thanks again :)
Yes, the NDE brought a much longer concern over not following my calling into sharp focus… and yet it took a good seven years more to start finding a way to fully move forwards. And even then it was so slow, and through such obscure small steps rather than any big leap forwards! I love my husband’s saying: ‘slow and steady wins the race’. xx
Hello Aoife. Just a quick note to say I'm only just home from an intensive residential in Yorkshire last week where I was without my laptop. It will take me a few days to give all the new pieces, including yours, the time they deserve. But I wanted you to know your piece has been received by me and I will read it and respond properly by Wednesday. Tanya xx
thats absolutely fine Tanya, no rush! thanks for letting me know xx
The story begins a long time ago. Long before you and I were born. Long before our parents met. Long before our grandparents grew old.
The story begins generations ago. In a land and time long gone. In languages and cultures that have changed beyond recognition. Inside of me it lives on.
The story begins a long time ago. But it continues to unfurl day in day out, its threads run through the tapestry of day-to-day existence: a bold crimson here, an ugly grey there, a faltering gold, a steadfast green, here are the threads that make up who I am, the threads that can be traced back across the years through the people the lands and times that made me who I am, and every day the story grows, a soft and steady amorphous mass, this is who I am who I am who I am.
Why do I write? Because when I write I take up the mantle and make it mine, when I write I grasp these cloths and bring them close, the dim and dark, the silvery light, I take them up and draw them in, the tangled threads, the knotted yarn, I take them up and draw them close, this stuff of story, this story of mine. I dissect, I embroider, I shape.
I must write. I feel the draw so keen so clear, the tug at my heart the voice in my ear, you must you must you must you must. I muster up the will to try, I sit, I start, I falter. I must I must I must I must – do more. Before I sit before I start I must do this I must do that, an endless list a bottomless vat, I must do this I must do that.
My life: a mother, a doctor, a daughter, a wife. Fulfilling, so full, exhausting, time-poor. I simply don’t know how to create space for more. My baby cries, my body aches, chores pile up, anxieties aggregate. My world grows small. But the story goes on and on and on, the story calls, it wants to be told. I want to tell it before I grow old.
Oh Zofia... this piece is exquisite in the fairy-tale sense, where the richness of texture and colour and yearning has its shadow counterpart to cast everything into urgency: and this is what you do here in those last lines where you present day identity and duties fights your storytelling self for time. I know so well that life stage (although I'm finally not in it anymore as of this last half year, now that I've nursed my mother to end of life, and have children who can finally at 15 and 17 move between home and the wider world without always needing me). But I also know, from my own writing which survived that time to tell my family stories of generations, and more importantly from the strong pulse in your work (both this piece and the unforgettable one for the Voices theme), that you will tell all the stories that want you to tell them. And it's a powerful feeling to have created a space here where I and others get to read some of them. Thank you.
Hello Zofia. Just a quick note to say I'm only just home from an intensive residential in Yorkshire last week where I was without my laptop. It will take me a few days to give all the new pieces, including yours, the time they deserve. But I wanted you to know your piece has been received by me and I will read it and respond properly by Wednesday. Tanya xx
I’ll take you to where the writing started. Well, not exactly the place, but it was the reason. To a Nissan hut. A World War II relic that in 1979 was a cancer ward.
Imagine we are there, you and me. Sitting on old, paint-chipped waiting-room chairs, our legs dangling. Reader’s Digests piled on a formica table, their flimsy covers jostling for space alongside forgotten coffee cup stains.
You see that door? The one with the scuffed kick-plate and broken handle? Beyond it is a room with grey walls, a single bed and a ceiling light that’s never turned off. That’s where my dad will take his last breath, Mum by his side, men with 40-a-day coughs the backing track to his death.
It’s okay. It happened a long time ago. But it was then, in the months that followed, that I started writing. Thousands of words bled onto the pages of a cheap WH Smith notebook, silently, and without fuss from the rest of the family. "She’ll be ok," I heard them say under their breath.
But, for a time, death tainted me, as if losing a parent was catching or a smell to be kept at arm’s length. School friends stumbled over their words and writing became a refuge, a sanctuary from pity. The looping letters, the break from reality, losing myself for rare moments of clarity. It helped. So I wrote until I felt sane. Then stopped, and hid the notebooks away.
It seems crazy that I left it so long to write again, but life, as it annoyingly does, got in the way. I climbed the corporate ladder to so-called success. Bought a house, an open-topped car, fell into relationships; some good, some bad. Then fell out of them again. Writing was always there, in my mind. Stories as I walked or late at night before I slept. Until, one day, that wasn’t enough.
This time, the letters tumbled and played on the page like newly fledged birds. Gone was the grief, replaced by freedom of expression, a voice, a life half-lived and a couldn’t-care-less attitude to what others might think. I started a blog. Rambled on for post after post, and some people liked it. It won an award. I was proud, but didn’t know what to do next.
Fast forward to 2023. There are days when I never imagined I would get here. Married. Older. Forgetful. In some ways, freer than I’ve ever been, in other ways, more confined. Now, writing feels like a race against time. Time that’s dripping away too fast. Never enough hours, or days, or months to write everything down. But I must.
Jane...this is an absolutely compelling response from you. 'Imagine we are there, you and me' you say, and when I understand where you have taken me, and why, this place you have re-created so tangibly... then I had a surge of awe at your strength, then and now, both. To find inside yourself, through yourself, what you needed back then in those childhood years after your father's death, and to be able to return to there now for this piece: my deep respect.
And what a powerful feeling it is to have provided a space where some of your new-made work can be read by me and others. This piece sent me back to read all your previous ones, and they all resonate now even more than the first time from my understanding them now in a deeper context. The one in which you first formed as a writer.
Thank you for sharing this with me, with us. Txx
Well, this is spooky. I was looking at the news and an article about the Nissan huts I wrote about in my piece pops up, photos and all https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-wiltshire-67629912
I love this aspect of the writing life - how things seems to be drawn towards us like iron filings to magnets when we are or have just put something into story form! x
I had forgotten when I started writing until your prompt. It was a deep-seated love all those years ago but was buried. Although I put the notebooks away, there were dreams of going to university, becoming a journalist and writing for magazines in the years after that. It's just taken me fifty-odd years to get my act together. Thanks for your kind and perceptive comments, as always. I'm also intrigued by what I've read about your masterclasses. Sign me up! J xx
Ah thank you for interest in Masterclasses. I was getting very close to going live… and now I’m taking a bit longer to think it through. I need to be sure I’m offering something high value and sustainable for me to deliver if I’m going to be asking for money from you and others. My hyper-conscientious and also my very systems-oriented side needs to be fully assured. But it’s helpful to know it sounded of interest to you. xx
Hello Jane. Just a quick note to say I'm only just home from an intensive residential in Yorkshire last week where I was without my laptop. It will take me a few days to give all the new pieces, including yours, the time they deserve. But I wanted you to know your piece has been received by me and I will read it and respond properly by Wednesday. Tanya xx
Thank you. I hope you’ve had a wonderful time.
Hello Tanya…think I’ve just posted something here..hope I have.
What can I say about Monday…what an honour and a privilege to meet you. I have to keep pinching myself. That was real. That was true. I love to think of you nearby, up the hill. I hope your week is going well. I shall never forget our meeting.. My son read what you’d written on Instagram, quietly and laboriously to himself ( he has severe dyslexia), and at the end just looked up and smiled. It’s good mum, he said.
It is. It’s good. Thank you🙏 xxx
I've just responded to your fierce and brilliant piece, but this as a PS to say how lovely that your son was able to read me and others saying how talented his mum is. Did you see what Amy Liptrot said about you too? That you were the star of her mothers who write course? xxx
He said it was our secret. He told me no-one would believe me. I was four years old, and I was silenced. I was a bridesmaid at his wedding. There’s a photograph taken outside the church, his hand resting on my shoulder like a clamp. I look terrified. After the wedding, he moved abroad with his wife, my auntie. The trauma didn’t go away, but I knew what I had to do. I have no recollection of this, but my mum told me recently that I begged her to teach me to read before I started school. I knew. I knew where I wanted to go to be safe. I wanted stories. I wanted words on the page, words that would take me somewhere else.
I read everything I could lay my hands on. I read under the covers at night. I read in the far corners of the playing field attached to our small village school. I copied my dad, an avid reader, who, if nothing else was available, would read the label of the HP sauce bottle on the table.
And I wrote my own stories. A very lovely teacher, Mr McNichol, read one out in class once. I was fifteen. He said it was the best story he’d read in a long time. I was mortified. All I felt was shame. I was supposed to be silent, and here were my words, being read out in public. My teachers wanted me to try for Oxford, to take the exam. I thought they were mad.
At university, not Oxford, the first in our family to go, I read and I read. I remember one December afternoon, sitting in a chair by the window of my bed sit, reading Mrs Dalloway. Devouring that book, the words of a magician, I thought. I was eating a packet of Viennese whirls. It got darker and darker, but I couldn’t get up to turn on the light. I was spellbound. How could she write such sentences, create scenes that felt so real. It was as if she was there in the room with me.
I have always kept a diary. For a long time, that was all I could do.
I was writing to bear witness. That question. Why do you write. Sometimes I just want to laugh out loud. I write because I have to. Because it’s like breathing. But most of all, thinking back to that four year old girl, I write because I want to be believed. I write to tell the truth. And because words saved me. The books that mean the most to me now are stories by women: Maggie Nelson, Virginia Woolf, Annie Ernaux, Emilie Pine, Kerri ni Dochartaigh, Amy Liptrot, and yes, you dear Tanya. Fiction or non-fiction, it doesn’t matter. I want the truth, and specifically, I want women’s truth.
Writing grounds me, settles me. I write to escape chaos, to process my trauma. Sometimes magic happens. Sometimes I despair.
At the end of the day it’s simple: I write because I want to tell my story.
My words, my life, my truth.
.
This is so powerful and empowering. You did so much in such a short piece, it was so visual. This line: his hand resting on my shoulder like a clamp and the detailing with the packet of Viennese whirls. I don't have a literary background and always struggle to put to words what works in writing, but I know how my body responds when I read something that rings so true. I'm glad you shared this.
Dear and wonderful Kerry... I've just now read your words, just over a week since we were able to meet in your library that is a haven for so many (and you a large part of making it so). One of my other Ilkley mentees came on the Arvon course, and said how the Hebden library was where she was helped to set up her life in the UK many years ago, arriving alone and vulnerable from overseas.... I love these rippling circles of connection and caring, and you in so many of them (both Amy Liptrot and Bec Evans saw my post about our meeting, and both were thrilled to learn of our connection, saying online how talented you are).
What you've written here: that early and devastating violation you should never have had to experience... such anger I feel to think of that being done to you... equivalent only to the awe I feel for the child-you who found her own process and path to a kind of safety. One which has connected you to me and many others.
I'm working hard these last few weeks of the year to design an affordable year-long Masterclass that would run as a separate Substack. It would be one fee for all and no free places, as I'm keeping this project free for the long term and the new offering will be intensive, meaning I can't take on much other paid work beyond it. But I'm hoping it will be something that might interest you and be within reach financially: a place where you can connect more intensively than here with others who are taking their practice to the next levels with regards to aiming towards publication. More on that before end of year via a message to everyone here on the free Substack...
Are you also aware that Arvon Lumb Bank are going through a major redesign this coming year - architecturally but also in terms of broadening their accessibility to their regional and working-class writers. As a librarian at Hebden, and a local writer who embodies so much of that vision/plan, have you considered getting in touch with them to ask if there's a way you can come on board as a tutor/host? I'd be very happy to be a referee/to support your approach. If you decide to give that a try, let me know and I'd be happy to talk with you in the new year about how you might pitch that...
Txxx
Tanya thank you as ever for your invaluable feedback. Am still pinching myself that we met. One of the best things that has happened for a very long time…and things are changing in a way I was beginning to despair would ever happen. My ex-partner is moving out tomorrow. I can’t believe I am writing that…but it is real. Next year is going to be special. And yes please! The masterclass sounds wonderful and I am most definitely interested…
And thank you for mentioning the Arvon stuff..but to be honest I don’t think I would have the energy for that..I just want to write and focus on that, and processing whatever comes up after these awful two years.
I met you! We had hugs! I have to write it to believe it but what an amazing day it was.
And yes, thank you, I did read what Amy had written in reply to your Instagram post..in fact, I sat next to her on the bus the other day and was able to thank her for her kind comments…
Wow. 2024. Bring it on…
Just a quick note Kerry to say I will read this and respond when I'm home from Arvon next week. Still buzzing from our meeting. Made my week! xxx
Made my week too Tanya…buzzing is the word for it!
Am glad the sun has come out for you ..xxx
The Million Reasons Why I Write (or Ten for Starters)
There are a million reasons why I write. A love of hyperbole is one.
On a fundamental level I write because I like words. I adore sentences and syllables, and even have a fondness for individual letters. When those building blocks of language are constructed with a certain rhythm, be it soaring cadence or bradycardic pulse, I can be wonderstruck at the beauty. When a kind friend compliments me on my post-chemo appearance, and I reply: “I think I look like a dumpy, grumpy, Aberdonian farmer,” they worry about my self-esteem, whilst I am revelling in the musicality of my self-description.
I write because I am deficient. The legacy of being born with disordered internal plumbing are distinguishing features that make verbal communication fraught: I laugh like Muttley; I cough daily making a sound more seal-like than human; and I speak with a broken voice that (mis)suggests an eighty-a-day habit. On the phone I’m asked to spell word after word, and in person confused listeners infer what I’ve said rather than ask for a repeat. But writing words on a page: crystal clear.
My cerebral wiring is also a little off. It was with relief that I realised during a lecture that there was a name – aphantasia - for the way my mind’s eye works without pictures; a name for the way my imagination uses words not images to make sense of the world; a reason that my day dreams are literal rather than figurative.
In my other life, when I’m not a writer and not a patient, I’m a doctor. Friends have said “the contrast must be nice” but to me there is not contrast, but synergy. To practice medicine requires empathy to be at the heart of a consultation. And writing is always an act of radical empathy, as I try to tell stories from behind a character’s eyes (especially when that character is me). Trying to understand words, actions, emotions, joys and sorrows: I write from the inside out. I practice empathy with both the stethoscope and the pen.
My obstacles are more mundane than poetic. There is the less admirable (another episode of Gilmore Girls to rewatch); the more relatable (too many books to read, friends to meet, family to care for); and then there’s the stage-hogging downright histrionic (lungs not fit for purpose, breast cancer, and toxic treatments that try to keep me alive). Despite the more dramatic latter list, I deserve no sympathy. I’ve had enough well and free days for me to have put Dickens to shame. The biggest obstacle is time: when I was younger, I believed that the days really were endless, now I am older I navigate paralysing fears that there are too few days left.
But I keep writing. I write because I don’t know how not to. I write because I am a human, who builds her world with words: I meditate with words. I grieve with words. I love with words. My writing is me.
Jane... this is such exciting writing. I've read you aloud to enjoy still more what you love, and me also, though I've never expressed it with the dash and determination of you here:
'When those building blocks of language are constructed with a certain rhythm, be it soaring cadence or bradycardic pulse, I can be wonderstruck at the beauty. When a kind friend compliments me on my post-chemo appearance, and I reply: “I think I look like a dumpy, grumpy, Aberdonian farmer,” they worry about my self-esteem, whilst I am revelling in the musicality of my self-description.'
...bradycardic pulse... dumpy, grumpy, Aberdonian farmer... yes, I understand you, and share this attention to the sounds of language and how it almost always creates the meaning in turn.
What you say about writing as an act of radical empathy. Also the aphantasia (which I have too, and my daughter). So much here that I hope you've already written about in more depth, and can send me the link to, if you have and it's in some public space.
I will be reviewing all the pieces received to this prompt over the Christmas holidays and letting everyone know in the early year who I've chosen for the free mentoring session. If that isn't you, then I'd still love to find a way for you and I to talk more, if you'd like that too...
Txxx
Thank you so much for this Tanya. It's just perfect timing. I ended up in hospital at the beginning of the week and as is usual, am now discharged and down and wondering where the words went and what is the point in them anyways. (I'm a teenager at heart really!) This was just the feedback I needed to remember that the words give me so much, and I'll get back to them when I'm ready.
Would love to find a way to speak at some point (though laughing cause currently mute - broken voice has given up with this infection!)
I saw an instagram post by you which made me concerned you were seriously ill, above and beyond your already-testing cancer treatment. You write with such strength, such rhythm... perhaps it's precisely at this time when your life and voice is being broken by illness that your written words will insist on speaking... and how glad I am that you may share more of them here.
I'm very close to turning on a paid subscription option on here for the new year - creating a new section within this Substack for a Masterclass Series, and only post within that will be for paid subscribers. I've decided that this story-sharing part needs to remain free.
Letting you know as I'm concerned your pledge will deduct from your account automatically, and I shouldn't wish you to pay for being here in this original and enduring part of the programme. Although if you want to join the Masterclass once you've read about it, then of course I'd love to have you as a paid subscriber for that - it's going to be a way I can give more full online mentoring to those here who want to take their creative practice and craft to the next level...
Txx
Thanks Tanya! Ended up in hospitial with a nasty infection (the anti cancer treatment continues to challenge my immune system!) Thanks for the heads up. WIll definitely be looking to enrol in the masterclass x
Oh Jane. Hoping with whole heart that you get some respite and rest over the holidays. xx
Just a quick note to say I'm teaching an intensive residential in Yorkshire this week and I'm without my laptop. But I wanted you to know your piece has been received by me and I will read it and respond properly when I'm home after the 4 December. Tanya x
Thanks Tanya. Hope the course is going well. Absolutely gutted to miss it x
I'm home now and have the pleasure of your piece ahead of me tomorrow afternoon. But before then I wanted to say how surprised and moved I was by your making a pledge should this project ever become a paid one, and even more so by what you've said. I'm not going to be accepting pledges for this Substack, I've decided (and my husband agrees!) as I want this to be a place where anyone finding it can always join in free of charge and build their creative confidence.
But I'd be very proud to use your words on my social media and websites, if I may, to speak for what the project offers?
And I am spending the last weeks of this year thinking about how I can start a separate smaller Masterclass substack that would be for paid subscribers only, in which I can share more fully everything I've learnt in the last 7 years - with monthly exercises covering everything from writing good author bios to the craft of writing and on into aspects of getting published and speaking to one's work in public. It's likely to be around £100 a year, and I will use this Substack to let all my current subscribers know. But yes, it feels important to me to keep this one fully open access - but the fact that you value you it so has helped me belief the Masterclass substack might find some subscribers.
Txxx
Of course, delighted that the words resonated, and very happy for them to be used in any way.
A Masterclass substack sounds like a great option!
Thank you!
It's both scary and exciting to start planning this week how the monthly Masterclasses could work... but the excitement is greater than the fear, as I want to teach/workshop craft and professional aspects of publishing as much as I still value supporting creative confidence. My week teaching at Arvon was my first chance to go deeply into craft with students, and it's reminded me how passionate I am about that and creative practice/process.
If I do go ahead, it will be in large part because of your perfectly-timed and very generous pledge and words of support.
xxx
Why do I write?..
My Dad was a story teller, short sweet nuggets of joy, delicately timed and spun just like a melody, starting with the low hum of a conspiratorial whisper, arching like a wave to curl back in on itself like a comic pear drop. The grace of the angler with his lift and cast, the eyes on the conjuror of the magic trick, attention transfixed, a bubble crafted in miniature. I would sit caught in the eddy with fizzy expectation, ready for the final line and euphoric break of laughter. He would watch the greats, Hancock and Sellers and I, in turn, would watch him. The intonation, the melodic rise and fall, the choreographed twitches and flex of his facial muscles; all soaked with gentle, kind humanity and love of his fellow man. When I had stories to tell at the end of the day, little observations squirreled away for later, I would snuggle into the familiar shape of him; happy to spin a story just for a minute or two; just for the lone ears of one or two.
And so, when the audience has been few or silent and the times and opportunities have not bent, I have wriggled my toes into more gritty, deeper ground. Rolling words around like marbles, feeling their texture and shape as they dance along my tongue - sliding and melting into sharp and dusty corners where thoughts and feelings bide their time. Satisfying the greed of all the many lives I will not live, to knead around inside myself so many mirrors of me, of we, of us, of all. To heal, to grieve, to fabricate and play the clown, to shout and shock and to rejoice. A chance to mould and shape without critique; to strip, dissect and let my anger disembowel all shocking truths upon the page.
I spin the thread for just a while, a nod to melody and shape. Still short - a bite. How could I presume to harness a soul for a page or more? Indeed, it would be foolish to think I could or, perhaps, it is just cowardice to think I could not? Perhaps I write for the thrill deep down that I may one day stray further than I should, believe in a story that could be told, feel the chill and loneliness of unfamiliar territory and risk no audience…or worse yet, ears that shun and leave. Margaret Attwood once said, if you don’t have a story, don’t write. I feel I have a thousand that swim around me unseen and unstructured…ready to morph me into shapes unknown if I am brave enough to stop the jig I dance around the edges, to resurface in stranger lands with compass lost and no way back. A traveller of sorts, if my soul will stretch that far…?
Oh Louise... I'm home now in Sussex after my week teaching at Arvon in Yorkshire, and how strange it has been to know there was a new piece by you I couldn't read til now...
...and what a pleasure it is to be back with your words again now. The thrill I got the first time you wrote for the project is there still, but with the deepening sense now that you will find a longer form also for these stories you have.
When you write about your father, the fatherless child and woman that I am yearns to stay with you for the length of a book... I am hungry for this kind of story, and when you write of him and you in relation/response to him there is such joy and beauty in your work.
There's a shadow side to that story too, I know, in other relationships, but that too you have a skill in exploring.
Such strong feeling reading this paragraph:
'How could I presume to harness a soul for a page or more? Indeed, it would be foolish to think I could or, perhaps, it is just cowardice to think I could not? Perhaps I write for the thrill deep down that I may one day stray further than I should, believe in a story that could be told, feel the chill and loneliness of unfamiliar territory and risk no audience…'
Admiring your writing as I do, I want to be back across from you at a cafe table once more so I can ask, gently, whether there might be a position midway between foolishness and cowardice that can serve you in writing that longer story about another soul? I recognise both of those positions from my own journey, of course, but having now made a book in which my mother's life is honoured, and my husband's, my beloved Granny's too... oh it's a good deep feeling. A quiet joy that means more to me than any of the more obvious rewards of publication. And I'd love for you to experience it too.
Dear Tanya, thank you so much for your words, and your kindness and support, it feels profound and thrilling that I could risk a little more. It would be wonderful if my travels take me your way again next year and you could prompt and inspire me over a cafe table once more - as the year draws to a close, wishing you and your family a peaceful Christmas and thank you so much for the gift of this space xxx
I was just now looking through my paper by month calendar (something I do at every end of year, to remember all the work projects I've done and new people met). We met in the very early weeks of this year - which took me aback as it still feels so fresh in my mind! xxx
Just a quick note to say I'm teaching an intensive residential in Yorkshire this week and I'm without my laptop. But I wanted you to know your piece has been received by me and I will read it and respond properly when I'm home after the 4 December. Tanya x
I write to make sense of myself. I write for myself and I write to be read.
I love writing, I love reading. I especially love reading letters other people's letters, journals and diaries, including my own letters and journals which speak of a time and a place, of the people in my life and my experience of myself in relation to them.
My biggest challenge is writing a memoir. I attend workshops, courses, and read loads of memoirs. I think I have found my thread, and know what I am weaving only for it to unravel again, and again.
I write to people I know and love, and who love me: emails, WhatsApp messages, e-letters, and carefully chosen occasion cards - birthday, thank you, thinking of you. I write me to you, and who you are shapes what and how I write. As I write I hold you in mind, and I hold you close, I care about you and what I am writing to you.
I write for and to connect with people I don't know, or don't know yet, emails, blogs, articles, posts on LinkedIn related to my work, to what I do, to what matters to me. I have written two books, both related to my work. The first 'Developing Assertiveness', is a book about developing self-confidence, belief in yourself. I write as a conversation me to you. I am the source material for this writing to you, but it is not about me.
My second book a longer, bigger book 'Assertiveness and Diversity' is all about developing confidence in ourselves and others, and creating a safe environment for people in which they can be themselves with each other, accepted for who they are. It is a me to you book. It is a more formal, academic, and researched book in which I share the work of others, and personal stories of others. They, more than me, are the source material.
I am the source material in a book of early life stories, called 'Children Growing Up with Religion' about the impact of an early religious upbringing on later life. I wrestled for ages about whether to write under a pseudonym, and encouraged by the vast majority of other writers, wrote with my own name. Both my parents were alive and I gave them my chapter to read before it was published. I am not sure that my mother really understood that I had written it for other people; my father did and he was proud of me, that I had come along way and he had no issues with it. I sent it to my sister, I felt worried that she might take 'Umbridge', instead she commented on my lack of punctuation and some other grammatical errors. I laughed with relief and gratitude.
I write lists, which I don't keep. I write one words on them, things to do, people to contact, stuff. I tick things off as I do them throughout the day. Sometimes the names of people don't get crossed off and go onto a new piece of paper, they join a new group. Some names get written again, and again.
Anni... how good to have you join us here, and particularly after our rich conversation for your podcast, in which the focus was - at your invitation - on my work, even while I found myself wanting to be talking more about yours!
What you say about the memoir in progress and how it weaves then unravels: I read this from you just minutes after looking out the long editorial letter I received on handing in the second draft of TCFS! How much it changed after that - me having to find a way to reweave my material to satisfy all of my editors' very fine questions. When we meet to walk and talk I can bring it as an artefact for you to look over - to show that the amount of reworking that goes on.
Moved by what you say about sharing your piece on religious upbringings with your parents: there's not many of us who will experience that strange mix of emotions that go with making our written/public voice known to our closest family.
This is the only monthly prompt I'm not curating into the story archive, as I've wanted to spend time suggesting strategies and resources to those who use their replies to indicate struggles or a wish for support. But if you write for any of the other themes, it will be such a pleasure to add your name and your words to the collection.
Txx
Thank you Tanya, I look forward to our walking and talking, and to you showing me the artefact of reworking. Until then I wish you well A xx
Why do I write? I write because I must.
I write because my thoughts become muddled as they form into speech. I open my mouth, sounds come out, but they don’t reflect the meaning in my head. The disconnect between my brain and my words has been with me always. My neurones, with their out-of-kilter connections, have never been studied or diagnosed or labelled. As a child, I was simply odd, a loner with an empty chair by my side. I knew I was different to the others. I stood on the fringes, observing the children who knew what to say.
Long childhood hours were spent creating projects, keeping creepy crawlies and writing, writing, writing. When written words spilled out, like magic they were in the right order, struck the right note, and they danced unselfconsciously in the sunshine without any awkwardness at all.
Fifty years on, spoken words still falter from my mouth in that familiar jumbly, erratic fashion and a spotlight shines on me as I know all the time people are looking at me, wondering who is this strange woman and her blurted-out words.
But give me a pen and the tap is turned on. Words flow out onto the paper and nowadays the keyboard, like molten lava, and I know they represent exactly what my fizzing brain is saying. The words aren’t fully formed or polished or even making sense, but they are the ingredients from which something will eventually emerge, sometimes slowly and painfully like a butterfly unfolding its damp brand-new wings, at other times popping out into the world like a baby seal, slick and perfectly formed.
When I write I can feel the mask, the one I wear to fit in, falling away until it’s barely there. I don’t need to concentrate on how to compose my face, to make sure I look you in the eye, or whether my comments are acceptable or ill-judged. I don’t have to pretend I am someone else.
When I don’t write, I’m bottled up like a blocked pipe. Stifled, as if I’m wearing a surgical mask, all communication muffled.
So why, sometimes, do I stop writing? I feel like it’s a kind of punishment. I know writing mends me, but there are times I don’t want to be healed. I must write, but an invisible wall lies between my thoughts and my hands. My words are sucked away in a vortex of gloom.
I have strategies now, writery friends and Tanya’s thoughtful prompts, to gently ease me away from such stupor. And now, even, I have shared my words. The inner workings of my mind have been read by others. At first that idea was as impossible as jumping from a cliff, but slowly the temptation to share grew like a seedling inside me, stronger and stronger as it reached towards the light. I danced around the idea, a moth drawn to a flame. Tempted but terrified.
Yet, here I am.
So much to relate to here, wonderful metaphors. Tempted but terrified...that's it exactly no matter how much I write!
Here you are. Yes! And how glad I am to have made a space where you feel safe and welcome. So much of what you so vividly describe from your childhood experience is true for me too - and part of why I have tried in each of my projects this last seven years to make a shared space alongside each of my solo endeavours. The child who didn't belong to any groups wanting to found them on the sort of terms that make others like me able to draw close. It means a lot to read your piece. Thank you.
Thank you so much for your insightful comments. And thank you for creating this wonderful supportive community ♥️
In the middle of our seventh-floor apartment was a small, windowless room, a space where we were safe from typhoon winds strong enough to smash the windows in the flat. When a force eight storm warning looked likely, the one we children hoped for because then school was cancelled, my parents would attach a metal cross bar, which had suction pads on each corner, to the biggest window to reinforce it. There was a story, perhaps apocryphal, that a man had died there, shredded by glass as the enormous pane blew in.
That dark room was perfect as a mini photography studio. I stuck up black card and pinched lights from my brother’s desk, plundering my mother’s spice cupboard for my first composition. It was a world of rich pigments and textures and I tipped them into coloured heaps, moving the lamps to light them just so. One of those, the nutmeg, was a bit part player, tucked to one side because it was nothing special; greyish-brown and slightly wrinkled, neither big nor small. It didn’t have the long, glistening lines of the vanilla pod or the intricate folds of the cinnamon stick, nor the deep, hot-country hues of ground paprika and turmeric.
Years later as a student, and having failed my first-year exams, I made a six-pint rice pudding to feed myself as I revised for resits. I grated a nutmeg onto the top and was astonished by its internal beauty; dark brown, irregular lines weaving through a light brown canvas, like neural pathways on a brain scan. And, as I took it between my fingers and lifted it to my nose, an inhale revealed another dimension, a warm-spice world of countries, perspectives and languages. I was holding an idea between my fingers, turning it over and over, exploring its possibilities.
This is why I write. Because the smallest thing can blow open your world. Working in slow time, you can watch ideas and beliefs spin out and away from you, their edges stretching for meaning. You begin to see complexity; something that was just blue yesterday, reveals itself to be subtle shades today: midnight, Denim and French navy. And words offer you connections, not just with concepts but with people. Because as you roll through life’s daily interactions, with the experiences that mark you in ways that can be difficult to voice, you begin to understand yourself and the people around you. You can be better and do better, more confident about what matters.
But, it can be difficult to create the solitude to think, let alone write. I am raising children, keeping a marriage and extended family together, throwing my all into the daily demands of everyone else. Orchestrating spinning lives consumes almost all of me: laundry, meals, cleaning, homework; I am counsellor and confidante. But, I am also resisting, quietly redrawing boundaries and expectations, clinging on to a crack in wall. Inch by inch I am advancing towards that other dimension, the one with limitless edges.
‘Inch by inch I am advancing towards that other dimension, the one with limitless edges.’ What a beautiful last line!
Thank you Nicola x
So very moving to read this truly beautiful piece by you (full of both soul and craft) on my son's 17th birthday - that birth which set in motion the haemmorhage that almost took me away from him ten days later. And which also brought into urgency my need to find a way to reach beyond home and family and work. It took me so long, as you know, to find a way to share my words, but your words reaching me today is the most beautiful proof that I made it into that clearing where those of us who love words, stories, attention head for, hope for. Your words connect with me, yes. And I love that you are making your way to me and other readers 'inch by inch' as I did.
And what rich details you've given us: the six-pint rice pudding, the windowless middle room... and this passage in particular is gorgeous:
"This is why I write. Because the smallest thing can blow open your world. Working in slow time, you can watch ideas and beliefs spin out and away from you, their edges stretching for meaning. You begin to see complexity; something that was just blue yesterday, reveals itself to be subtle shades today."
This is the only theme in the collection where I'm not curating responses over in the permament archive - only so I can give time to those who respond with questions or feelings about writing which invite suggestions/recommendations from me. But I hope you will continue to write for other themes in the archive, as you have before - I will always enjoy seeing more of your work...
Thank you Tanya, for your support for all of us who share our words and thoughts here. And thank you too for the time you spend reading and commenting. Encouragement is uplifting - writing can be an uncertain process.
It's my absolute pleasure. I was very clear from my own first small published piece in 2015 that each time I undertook a project, I'd find ways to extend opportunities to others in turn. So each time you and others join me here, it's a special feeling! xx
Why do I write?
So much easier to answer the question if it had been: ‘How do you write?’ Or ‘Where do you write?’ Or even ‘What?’ or ‘When?’ But ‘Why..?’ Why do I write?
The only answer is really: I write because I have to, because I need to.
It isn’t all the time. I’m not a writer who has a plan and who carefully plots out their day, deciding how many words shall hit the page this morning, how many paragraphs shall be the target for today, diligently typing or writing whilst letting the coffee go cold and social media un-scrolled, distractions ignored as work gets done and pride and satisfaction are achieved at the end of the allotted time. Oh, sometimes I wish I could write that way and oh, how much I admire those who do!
But I’m a writer who writes when something needs to burst out, when something I’ve seen or heard or felt has affected me profoundly and has become too much for me to hold inside any longer. The thought or idea taps at my chest, insisting that I find my words and set it free, like opening a cage for a captive bird.
It doesn’t happen all that often, but when it does, that urge, that drive just cannot be ignored and I must rush and find my pen, I must open my notebook and I must write this down.
I learned a while ago, from Jeff Tweedy who eloquently expresses this in song, that once a writer shares what they have to say, it belongs entirely to them no more, but to all who read it. That scared the hell out of me to begin with, because what if no one understood what I was trying to say, and it was ‘out there’ but no one liked it or wanted it? That it didn’t belong anywhere, or to anyone?
Then I remembered something else: that all the most wonderful writing that I have ever read made me feel deeply, touched me somewhere fundamental and visceral, often made me cry and brought me somehow to a recognition of myself and my connection to all things and all people. Because even if I didn’t see what the writer was describing in exactly the same way as they did, or if I didn’t feel the precise way that they did (perhaps because our experiences of life or our circumstances were different), nevertheless if their writing sparked something in me, then it became mine as well as theirs and the connection was forged. And from connection grows understanding, respect, compassion, empathy and love.
This is why I write: because I have a need to make connections. Because I want to share a thought, and idea or an experience in a way that touches someone and ignites a spark for them, in a way that brings feelings to the surface and sets them free.
... and your words from today have already reached their first receptive reader in me, here at my late afternoon kitchen table. And that's how I think of my writing too - a spark that someone might carry with them in straw until they need it to catch and kindle something in themselves. I love how you've articulated the urge that builds up, and how it always at last surges past any fear-thinking. What is the Tweedy song? We can add it to the ones we are going to sing when we meet!
This is the only prompt in the collection that I'm not curating responses for over on the book site, as I wanted to have time to give detailed resource and practice advice to those who showed a wish for it. But any others you write for will be curated as usual.
Txx
Thank you so much for your response, Tanya! I’m always amazed by how swiftly you get back to us and also how you really get to the heart of what we are writing and give us such compassionate and loving understanding. My gratitude is real!
The Tweedy song is ‘What Light’ and it’s on Wilco’s Sky Blue Sky Album. You probably know by now that I’ve lived much of my life to a Wilco soundtrack and that Jeff Tweedy is highly revered by me. I think singing one of his songs together would be really good and while I’m at it, I think we should include a Natalie Merchant (or 10,000 Maniacs) song on our set list. I was lucky enough to see her at the London Palladium last week and was blown away by her and her music - what an incredible woman!
Love to you xx
Love 10,000 Maniacs! xxx
I write to live.
One of my Mum’s proudest accomplishments is that she taught me to read at 3 years old. Now I have my own child I wonder at this accomplishment, the dedication it must have taken from her, and the fortitude from me, to sit quietly and learn my letters over and over again. The gift I am always grateful for – the ability to lose myself in books from a young age, books and their fantasy storylines becoming a lifeline in the dark. Hours lost in the pages of another world, the ability to disappear. A physical manifestation of the regular dissociation I practiced to escape the less salubrious activities that took place behind the closed doors of my childhood home.
The natural bedfellow of reading is writing. Soon writing became my second ally, a buoyancy aid that prevented me from drowning in the storms that raged within and around me. As a child, I rarely used my speaking voice. I had swallowed it whole as I did not trust what it would say. I did not trust that it was safe or that my truth would be, could be heard. As my vocal cords seized, writing became my voice. A safe and accepted means of expression, one within my control and dominion. A place where I could create my own beautiful fantasies, create pictures out of words, acceptable to others or kept private just for me.
For as long as I can remember I have written poems and then diaries. Hundreds upon hundreds of notebooks, thousands upon thousands of words detailing all that I am unable to say. The secrets, the unspoken truths, the mundane days and the detailed dreams and nightmares of my sleep. My worries and my fears. The joys, celebrations, hopes and dreams. Would I still be here if I had not had writing as my ally for all these years?
My writing is my voice, my writing is my voice, my writing is my voice.
Looking back now I see how, in the absence of others, my diaries can accept all my words. There is no shame in sharing on their blank pages and I am able to empty myself of the thoughts that would otherwise drown and unhinge me whilst also giving shape to my dreams.
My greatest challenge now, to write for others. To release my words on to public pages for all to see. To voice my truth on the stark white pages of a lit-up book; whispering, shouting, spewing my words on to the page. To finally give myself a voice, an unedited precedent, to allow myself to be seen and heard, to be authentically me, my story finally shared and set free.
How strongly I responded to this soul-full piece by you. What you say about reading being a buoyancy aid... oh yes, books as escape mechanisms for those of us in dangerous or just uncertain childhood homes, but I love how your particular image opens up such depth and dimension to that familiar experience. And how you've caught my imagination with your hundreds upon hundreds of notebooks... you sound, like me, and like so many of the fine emerging writers I now mentor, to have had what I call 'an overlong apprenticeship' - you've been training your ear, your muscles, your attention, for so long, but without a way to bring that to a readership.
But you're here now! And I suspect you will soon find - like so many who began here - that you'll find more and more ways to test your words out beyond those private pages now. It will be my pleasure to be a small part of helping that happen.
This is the only theme I'm not curating responses for over on the book site, and only because I want to give more time to suggesting further reading or techniques, for those who responses are asking for that.
It's not a cheap or easy book to get hold of, as it's an American import, but if you can afford it, do take a look at The Answers Are Inside The Mountain by poet William Stafford. He was first published after 40 but then went on to be his state's poet laureate. The book is a collection of his decades-long creative and teaching practice - it's such a wise and gentle companion for the time when we (like him) are moving out from a long diary-keeping practice into more public forms of expression...
I love that title 'The Answers a are Inside The Mountain' too. Will try and get hold of the book... Yes I have been apprenticing to this a long time, the idea of writing in public just a whisper who's strength is now growing x
Thank you Tanya for this project and for your kindness. It feels like a deep and treasured awakening to have my writing 'seen' and responded to after all this time. And even better by an author who's work and story has so inspired me! I really appreciate you opening this container. Chloë xx
Touched. And it really is my pleasure to be joined here by you xx
If you’d asked me when I was a teenager why I wanted to write, I would have said: for the 10 percents. This is based on advice my Mom once gave me. She said that life is 10 percent ups, 10 percent downs, and 80 per cent in the middle. As an adolescent, I wanted to be a foreign correspondent and write about human misery, or to be like Hemingway and write beautiful novels on a tropical island, with a sweaty cocktail on the desk next to my typewriter. In other words, I wanted to write about the ten percents.
Instead, in my 50s, I continue to fill notebooks and computer files with the 80 percent. I write about the way the overhead light in my kitchen glints off yesterday’s plate, which is dusted with crumbs from the Halloween cookies we ate. I write about my digestive problems. I write about the fear that I’ll never be a proper writer because I never edit and share my work.
As it turns out, writing about the 80 percent is a lot easier than risking my life in war zones and witnessing a lot of suffering. Or dying of liver failure after too many rum and cokes in my house in the Bahamas. Plus, there’s a lot more material if you write about the 80 percent – exactly four times more, to be exact. While there will always be war and misery and astonishing sunsets over the Caribbean, there is a lot more harsh kitchen lighting and crumbs on plates and indigestion and longing. So despite my writerly teenage intentions, I have ended up writing entirely about the 80 percent of life that’s middling.
For example, when I was 23, I wrote about a laundromat in Cincinnati, Ohio. On the wall above the coin machine, there was a clock with a plastic cut-out of Elvis Presley in the middle. His arms were the clock’s arms, and his hips moved back and forth with each second. In the damp, noisy drone of the laundromat, it was just me and Elvis, shaking his hips, tick, tick, tick; one arm pointing to the 2 and the other at 35 past the hour. I sat in a yellow fiberglass chair with my journal on my lap. Clothes spun wildly in a dryer. At that same moment, my boyfriend was at home making black bean soup, steaming up the windows, in the attic apartment we rented from an old Chinese couple.
Little moments like that laundromat are peppered throughout my stacks of old notebooks. And now I see why. At the time, I was disappointed with my life, afraid I’d settled too soon. From the vantage point of years, I now see how perfect it was. The kitchy clock, the boyfriend, the poky apartment. All perfect and just as it was meant to be. It seems like a way to honour who I was and the life I was given.
Wendy - thank you so much for joining us here with this first and richly detailed piece: and you remind me all over again why notebooks are such a precious practice: however well we think we will remember life, it is the act of writing down the launderettes, the clothes in the dryer, the black bean soup that keeps it fully alive and accessible to us - even without needing to read it back often/ever. (I smiled at it in deep recognition too - one of my first dates with my husband of the last thirty years was at the campus launderette! We sat on top of the machines and sang Elvis Presley songs - so it's quite uncanny to read your piece now with so many similar motifs! Perhaps its the nature of young love: we eat soup, we don't own washing machines... but the Elvis bit! That's magic!).
This is the only theme in the three-year archive where I'm not curating responses over on my book's website: this so that I can give more time to responses where someone has identified a difficulty with their writing life where I can point to useful resources/perspectives. But if you write for other themes in the project - as I very much hope you will, enjoying your prose style here as I do - then it will be my pleasure to add your words to the collection.
And can I say how lovely it is to see you taking time to read and respond to others' words with such generosity and attention. That is an aspect of the project that makes it more than the sum of parts I could bring into being on my own - and it really matters to people: its often the first time they are feeling their stories being received by strangers. Precious. Thank you.
Tanya xx
Thanks so much for your generous comments, Tanya. I'm so excited to finally join this community of writers -- I first heard about it at a workshop you taught at the Chipping Norton Lit Festival a year or two ago. I look forward to posting and commenting on some of the past themes.
Ah! How lovely to know we were in the same time/place together. I loved that workshop so much. And Louise Stead who is a regular contributor here was there that day too...